NO AI WAS USED: Will AI be the End for Creative Writing or the Beginning of Something New?
By Bethany Lam
According to the Oxford Royale Academy, creative writing is defined as ‘... original writing that expresses ideas and thoughts in an imaginative way.’ Creative writing is mostly used for fiction, a fancy flight of imagination that aims to create worlds of escape for readers. However, with AI able to generate books at the push of a button, the question needs to be asked: Will people read absolutely anything, so long as it has a story, or will they turn away from AI-generated books on ethical grounds?
Around February 2026, a romance writer came out publicly by sparking controversy and a myriad of opinions. Coral Hart - not her real name - used AI to write all her novels, self-publishing 200 romance novels under 21 different pen names in the year. She used AI, earning 6 figures from the 50,000 copies of her ‘books’. Of course, as it is evident that AI will be incorporated into everything the modern world is doing now, it is impossible to not use it, but some question if it should be used for ‘generating full drafts’.
Hart uses Claude AI, which is from Anthropic, the same AI that illegally downloaded millions of pirated books to train their systems. This resulted in a lawsuit, which led to paying an estimated $3,000 USD for each author of the 500,000 books they stole. However, some may argue that the damage was done. What is paying 1.5 billion compared to the money AI-generated books can make?
“If I can generate a book in a day, and you need six months to write a book, who’s going to win the race?” asked Hart.
It is inevitable that some people nowadays will use AI to generate their books, but there are a lot of problems with it. It may be faster, but everything that Anthropic used to train Claude AI to generate those books were stolen from authors who spent those six months or more to weave an actual original and creative story. AI also lacks emotional depth, and this causes problems with characters and representation. Additionally, since when did creative writing become a race? Many readers believe that if writers juggling other jobs, best-selling authors like Sarah J Maas, J.K. Rowling, George R.R Martin, Stephen King, and thousands of other people alike can write originally, it shouldn’t be acceptable for others to use AI to generate “their own” books.
Ultimately, the reading of AI produced fiction will be down to personal preference, similar to whether or not you mind AI produced music or not. However, whether or not AI can genuinely replace physical authors, create unique and engaging stories with originality, and forge a definite connection with readers… That remains to be seen.
Postscript
For those who struggle for new and interesting ideas, here are some good ways to use AI in creative writing without being a thief:
Writing prompts
Brainstorming
Looking for agents or publishers
Creating fantasy names
Research
Proofreading
Rephrasing some confusing parts
Feedback
Synonyms, rhyming, opposite words (vocab in general)
Formatting and structure