Why I Won't Use AI In My Work

Why I Won’t Use AI to Write My Books

I can guess what you’re thinking, so no: this isn’t about fear or conspiracy theories. 

This is about integrity. 

This is about authenticity.

It’s also about not getting into bed with Silicon Valley weirdos who think using mind-altering hallucinogenic drugs has zero consequences. But I digress.

Listen. I’m old enough to remember what life was like before Steve Jobs gave us the iPhone. Before Al Gore gave us the internet. As a result, I know life was not only possible before those things came around but also that it was really good. For some of you, that’s a shocking thing to hear.

But I’m not trying to be shocking. I’m trying to be real. 

I think it’s pretty clear that AI isn’t ready for prime time. But let’s go full analog and dig deeper.

What’s Artificial Intelligence Even Mean?

Spoiler alert: I’m a word nerd (duh). But I’m not gonna just copy and paste gobbledygook from a dictionary into my article, so let’s peek at the essence of the meanings of both Artificial and Intelligence. I’ll open my handy compact edition of The Oxford English Dictionary (it only weighs like, a million) and we’ll geek out a little. 

The Definition of Artificial

Well, crap. It’s already fiddly: There are two totally different senses of the word in question, and that muddies the waters. 

The first sense has to do with being fake or counterfeiting something. But the second sense (and surely this is the way we’re meant to understand AI) is about someone exhibiting special training or skill.

But I have a bigger question: Can a machine be trained? Can it learn? Maybe. Maybe not. I suppose it depends on how we define training and learning. However we do that, what a machine can never be is human. We’ll get to that a little later.

The Definition of Intelligence

Intelligence is really a mash-up of knowledge and awareness. There is a hint of the soul here, which is uniquely human. I personally believe that requires the breath of God.

A machine, if it “knows” anything, only knows whatever it can find in the data it has access to (which is the internet, which is code for “true”, obviously). But the results it gets from that data are…let’s be kind and say unreliable.

In that same spirit of kindness, the softest description I can muster for AI is that it’s a misnomer. It’s not artificial in the sense of possessing skill or training, and it’s not intelligent in the sense of being intuitive. 

If I suddenly came over all cynical, I’d say AI is mostly marketing hype. 

And if I were brutally honest, I’d say AI is an intentional deception designed and intended to make a quick buck. Like EVs, the metaverse, and Apple’s weird goggles, I don’t see a great clamor for this stuff. These are all answers to questions no one is asking; “solutions” for nonproblems.

It’s deeply flawed. I’ve tried using it. And I’m not buying.

Can a Machine Experience Anything?

My mentor’s name is Mike. He’s an actual human person, and he once told me—as I prepared to go do something very hard—that some things can only be known by experience. 

Mike was right, of course.

He meant me to understand that there was nothing further he could do to prepare me for what I was about to undertake. There comes a time when all learning, all words, and all head knowledge must give way to action. Experience. That’s the only way learning can continue. 

In other words, the doing—the experiencing—is the turning point where book lessons usually get wrecked. It’s where critical mass happens and a fundamental change is catalyzed. 

There’s no way to communicate what something’s really like until you’ve lived it. You can’t know what it feels like to climb Everest, have a child, lose someone to the grave, graduate from school, drive a car the first time, fall head over heels in love…until you’re living the experience.

But for AI, everything outside the internet doesn’t exist. For AI, the real world is just something it read about once. It reminds me of what C.S. Lewis said—that a fish doesn’t know it’s in the water. 

Real-World Experience

Have you ever experienced a sunrise? Felt it deep in your soul and breathed deep as you saw light explode in millions of colors and textures across the eastern horizon? I bet if you have, you remember how it made you feel. And the things it made you think about.

How about enduring something hard to win a breakthrough? Can you describe what that felt like? There’s a reason we often blurt out, “There are no words.” Because there really aren’t.

And speaking of words failing, how about love? Can a machine “trained” on data that’s deeply flawed ever begin to know what love is?

What is Real Intelligence?

There are four versions of authentic intelligence. These become clear even after a skim through the first few chapters in the book of Proverbs (that’s in the Bible, which I recommend). 

• Knowledge

• Understanding

• Wisdom

• Insight 

Knowledge and Understanding

Knowledge is pretty simple. It’s just facts, such as the documented fact that Napoleon got his butt kicked by the Russian winter in 1812.

It would take understanding to composite those facts into an application, such as: 

Hitler was an idiot for a lot of reasons, but one of the main ones was that he didn’t learn from Napoleon’s mistakes. 

As a result, the Nazi war machine ground to a frozen halt, about a century after Napoleon did, in pretty much the same situation.

So, if knowledge is a memory bank of facts…and understanding is the application of those facts…AI has a big problem. Because it still struggles with facts, there’s no way it’s moving up to understanding.

Now, even if we combined the intelligence required for knowledge and understanding, wisdom and insight go well beyond. 

Wisdom

Wisdom is enlightenment coupled with experience. It’s finding purpose in suffering and pain, for example. Do you know what a sage is? That’s usually an elder man or woman, someone who has seen many winters, overcome (or suffered) all kinds of hardship. It’s Teddy Roosevelt’s man in the arena.

Insight

Insight is cut from the same cloth, only it doesn’t necessarily require age and experience. I think it’s best described as revelation. That’s when something that was previously unknown becomes known or is revealed. It’s not adding facts to some knowledge database. It’s a eureka moment, and I think it carries awesome power because it goes well beyond logic to intuition. 

Since I have yet to see any machine really successfully process these things, I think AI is a very poor investment—not only for my talent and treasure—but especially my time. And, if you can receive this, yours too.

What’s Human Is Human.

AI in 2025 is really just a development of search; it’s the next layer on the cake Google’s been baking all these years. Sure, it sometimes spits out usable information (not just data). That can be an improvement over a raw Google search sometimes. 

But that doesn’t make AI intelligent. And it doesn’t make AI smart. I admit that with a lot of patience and guidance, AI is useful for research sometimes. Except you have to fact-check its answers. 

Hello. Are you doing that in your interactions with it?

Which brings me full circle and hammers home my point: AI has not earned my trust (full disclosure—it probably never will). If it’s not worthy of trust for something as routine as a web search, it’s certainly unworthy of trust when it comes to art.

Art is an expression and overflow of the experience of the human soul. The agony and the ecstasy. Can a machine even begin to understand or express these priceless things? I say no. That’s why all the books I write are one-hundred percent organically written by me, with no AI involvement. 

If I wrote stories using AI, I’d be a fraud, a counterfeit, a hypocrite. In fact, I wouldn’t even be an artist. I’d just be a user. 

I think one of the higher reasons we write and read stories is because we long for an authentic connection to someone who gets us, someone who understands the struggle and the joy of life, the darkness of betrayal, the joy of hilarity. And I hope it moves your heart knowing, if I’ve written it, there’s a living soul behind every word on every page. 

Therefore my stories are, and will only ever be, authentically human-made. It’s absurd that I even have to write that, but it’s worth saying today: art is for humans. And only humans can make it.

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