In a word, no.
Every day, I hear business owners ask, ‘Should I just let AI write it for me?’ And I hear others talking about how much time AI saves them. When I engage in such conversations, I invariably find that the business owner has decided to use AI because it’s what they’re seeing others do.
Too often, there is little understanding of what generative AI is, how it works, or what it’s doing to their business and the world they live in.
I don’t use generative AI, nor do I teach my clients to use it in any part of their writing process. Read on to learn why.
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AI doesn’t produce good content
Even those of you who are convinced you can’t write, write far better than generative AI does. Generative AI doesn’t actually understand or create anything. Rather, it looks for patterns and simply provides the next logical word in a series to produce something that looks like what we'd call a sentence.
Yes, those bots can spit out a lot of words, but they aren’t good words. They lack
- Emotion
- Personality
- Originality
- Authenticity
In other words, they lack humanity.
Your readers and future clients want to hear from and connect with you. They will only trust you enough to help them if you speak directly to them in your own words.
If you’ve been told you can’t write, it was likely by someone who was trying to get you to produce a very particular kind of writing – like a teacher who needed you to learn to write for exams.
You’re not at school any more. You’re not sitting an exam.
I’ve been working with writers for 24 years now. In that time I’ve learned that if someone can talk about something, they can write about it. And that writing really doesn’t need to be as hard as you were taught to make it.
If you can talk about what you do in your business and want to see if I can make writing about it easy, sign up for my free mini course: https://ewc.coach/write-engaging-blog-posts/
Let me help you stop wasting time and learn to write the easy way!
AI is terrible for the environment
AI uses massive amounts of water and electricity (see Forbes). It also produces a lot of e-waste – adding poisonous amounts of things like lead and mercury to our water and soil (see The Curious Economist).
Most sources say an AI query uses 10 times as much electricity as a Google query (see for example, Goldman Sachs and Marta Reyes), but one source, The Brussels Times, says it’s up to 25 times as much electricity.
To make matters worse, many AI servers are located in countries, like the US, that burn coal to produce at least some of their electricity.
When we see climate disasters like Appalachian communities that are hundreds of miles from the nearest ocean flooded by a hurricane (this happened in summer 2024), I don’t think it’s ethical to use AI for things like idea generation, article structure, research, or entertainment.
AI is bad for our society: Language
Generative AI is bad for our society in part because of how it erodes our language.
In 2017, Timothy Snyder published a book called On Tyranny. It was written in response to the first Trump administration, and Snyder probably wasn’t thinking much about AI as he wrote it. Nor does he mention AI when he reflects on chapter 9 in a 2021 YouTube video. Nevertheless, much of what he writes in chapter 9, ‘Be kind to our language’ is useful in thinking about how generative AI is shaping how we think and speak.
In the video, Snyder argues, the internet makes our language smaller. The algorithms that show us words that make us angry or happy do the work that Orwell imagined humans doing in 1984 – they reduce the number and types of words we’re exposed to in order to provoke a predictable and desired reaction.
In the case of social media algorithms, they keep us on the platform longer.
Generative AI shrinks the language faster by making users ‘write’ in the same tone, using the same words to provoke the same reactions.
This language shrinkage is bad for society because if we lose the ability to describe new things and experiences and to imagine things other than as they are, we will simply accept things as they are.
How do we avoid this? By reading books, talking to people, and spending time thinking and writing for ourselves.
Writing and other forms of creativity are vital to our humanity. We owe it to ourselves to maintain our facility with language. If we don’t, we risk being easily led by those who might not have our best interests at heart.
AI is bad for our society: Lies
Another reason I won’t teach you to use AI in any part of your writing process is that it harms society by making stuff up.
When generative AI doesn’t have an answer, it creates one. I’ve written about this before in a blog post that discusses the trouble Michael Cohen had when he passed his attorney a list of bogus legal citations he got from generative AI – the judge in his case was not impressed.
In that case, clearly Cohen was harmed more than anyone else. In instances that don’t make the news, we’re all harmed.
This happens when people believe what their AI “research” tells them. Some of what it produces may be true, but you can’t vet its sources, so you cannot know if it’s all true.
To judge any source of information, ask these questions:
- Who’s saying this?
- What is their evidence?
- What are their qualifications?
- What are their motives?
- What corroborating evidence can I find that what this source says is true?
Vetting your sources will make you a better informed person and, if you’re blogging, help your SEO by showing that your blog provides trustworthy information.
In whatever you’re writing, please remember these two things:
- Truth matters.
- Facts matter.
As we saw 8 years ago and are seeing again now, “alternative facts” are dangerous.
You owe it to yourself and your audience to do your own learning, thinking, and writing. We need truth and facts. As Timothy Snyder says in chapter 10 of On Tyranny, ‘To abandon facts is to abandon freedom. If nothing is true, then no one can criticize power, because there is no basis upon which to do so. If nothing is true, then all is spectacle. The biggest wallet pays for the most blinding lights.’
AI is racist, sexist, classist, and biased against the LGBTQIA+ community
Generative AI is bigoted.
As Meredith Broussard argues, ‘racism, sexism and ableism are systemic problems that are baked into our technological systems because they’re baked into society’.
What makes this particularly pernicious is that much of the bigotry isn’t overt and easy to identify.
This is made clear in an article on covert racism and AI from Stanford University. One way companies have tried to reduce racism is to scale the models up, but ‘scaling the models up doesn’t help either. “Overt racism goes down as you make the language model bigger, but covert racism actually goes up, which is quite concerning,” Kalluri says’ (Stanford).
Most people don’t have the necessary training to consistently spot covert bigotry in AI outputs. So the chances of this kind of harm being inflicted on readers by users of generative AI is very high.
The Stanford article looks specifically at bias against users of African American English. I think it's reasonable to assume that similar bias exists for users of other "non standard" Englishes, which is one of the ways classism shows up in AI outputs.
UNESCO has looked at these problems with AI and made some proposals for how countries can mitigate the harm caused – in part by calling on governments to insist that companies work with a variety of stakeholders to correct them. You’ll find an overview in this press release from UNESCO and more detailed information in this write up of their findings.
The UNESCO study shows how generative AI favours heteronormative relationships and traditional gender roles. It reproduces and reinforces the idea, for example, that medical doctors are male and nurses are female.
Using AI puts your copyright at risk
As usually happens when there’s a technological advancement, the legal system is lagging behind. This means people are using generative AI before the courts have decided who owns what, which puts their copyright at risk.
Before I go any further, let me make this clear: I am not a lawyer. What follows is not legal advice. If you need advice on these issues, contact a qualified intellectual property rights lawyer.
I’ve focused my research for this section mostly on the UK, but have also looked at some material on the situation in the US and the EU. Amongst the questions that have still not been decided is a crucial one around copyright: who owns the things created using generative AI? It could be any of the following:
- The person who wrote the code to create the AI (see ‘Copyright protection in AI-generated works’)?
- The person who created the content that was used to train the AI (see ‘Generative AI – Addressing Copyright’)?
- The person who put the prompt(s) into the AI to produce the thing (see ‘Ownership of AI-generated content in the UK’)?
These ambiguities are part of the reason big publishers (like Amazon) won’t copyright books that were created using AI. You see, in the US, if a piece is created through a combination of human and AI effort, the AI portions cannot be copyrighted.
It’s more complicated in the UK because material that has been produced wholly by a machine can be protected, though on different (and less favourable) terms to the copyright granted to human productions (see ‘Ownership of AI-generated content in the UK’).
If you’re thinking, ‘But I make some changes before I publish, so I’m fine’, you might not be. The courts also haven’t yet decided how many changes a human has to make before they gain the copyright (see ‘How Many Humans Do You Need’; the UK courts haven’t yet made a determination on this).
As the law stands, I think it’s too risky to use generative AI to create anything you might want to own or sell.
Writing your own material really can be easy
As you can see, I’ve given my position on generative AI a lot of thought. If you want to learn how to write original content (books, blogs, newsletters, social media posts) that will engage your potential clients, I can help.
The best place to start is with my free mini course, even if you’re not interested in blogging – the outlining technique I teach in it is the same one I use for all of my writing and with all of my clients for their books, newsletters, etc. The mini course also gives you an idea of what it’s like to work with me as a writing coach.
During the course, you’ll get recorded lessons, some asynchronous coaching via email, and, if you complete all three tasks, a 30-minute 121 coaching call. Click the button below to stop wasting time wondering what to write to connect with your future clients: