The AI Question: Is It Ethical to Write with AI?

When ChatGPT launched in late 2022, for better or worse, the world changed. Many industries have felt the effects, but few more acutely than writing and publishing. Lines have been drawn, with staunch supporters and vocal opponents digging in.

First, let’s address the elephant in the room. Whether it's ethical to use AI is a decision you must make for yourself. Instead of prescribing a right or wrong, this article aims to lay out the facts, explore the nuances, and provide a comprehensive framework to help you navigate this complex new landscape.

The Case for Writing with AI

Proponents of integrating AI into the writing process typically focus on three core benefits: accessibility, learning, and efficiency.

Lowering Barriers to Entry

Not everyone has the ability to sit at a desk for hours and write. Aspiring authors may face physical disabilities, neurodivergence that makes sustained focus challenging, or demanding family and work obligations that leave little time for creative pursuits. For these individuals, AI tools can be revolutionary, helping to organize thoughts, overcome the blank page, and structure a narrative. In this context, AI isn't a shortcut; it's a ramp that makes the craft of writing accessible to a wider pool of talent.

A Coach on Demand

AI writing and editing tools are trained on vast datasets of literature and text. This allows them to function as an ever-present writing coach. They can offer suggestions for improving prose, tightening plot points, and identifying inconsistencies. For writers who are still honing their craft, this immediate feedback can accelerate their learning curve, helping them elevate their storytelling faster than ever before.

Reclaiming Time and Speed

Writing a book is an extremely long, arduous, and rewarding process that often takes years. Not everyone is willing or able to dedicate that much time. AI tools can dramatically speed up parts of the process, such as drafting initial scenes, brainstorming plot twists, or researching historical details. Proponents argue that if this technology enables more people to complete and share their stories, it enriches our collective literary culture.

The Arguments Against Writing with AI

Opponents of writing with AI raise concerns that center on three main points: the integrity of the art form, environmental costs, and perhaps most importantly, the unresolved legal and ethical issues surrounding how these models are trained.

Artistic Integrity and the Human Element

What does it mean to be a writer? Opponents argue that prompting an AI is not the same as writing. The true art, they contend, lies in the struggle. I.e. the meticulous choice of words, the rhythm of a sentence, and the infusion of personal experience and emotion into the text. They believe that outsourcing this process to a machine, no matter how sophisticated, dilutes the author's voice and removes the human element that makes a story resonate.

The Environmental Cost

AI models do not run on magic; they run inside data centers that require immense amounts of electricity and water. The process of training a single large language model can have a significant carbon footprint. Beyond energy, water consumption for cooling these powerful computer systems is also a major concern. While any digital activity has an environmental footprint, the scale of AI operations increases a user's impact.

The Copyright Controversy

This is perhaps the most contentious issue. Leading AI companies, including OpenAI and Anthropic, face numerous lawsuits from authors, publishers, and news organizations. High-profile authors like George R.R. Martin, John Grisham, and Jodi Picoult have joined a class-action lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging "flagrant and harmful infringements" of their registered copyrights.

The core of the argument is that these AI companies used copyrighted books and articles, scraped from the internet without permission or compensation, to train their commercial models. The New York Times is also suing OpenAI and Microsoft, claiming their AI tools can reproduce its journalism verbatim, creating a direct competitor with stolen material. These lawsuits contend that this practice amounts to "systematic theft on a mass scale," undermining the livelihoods of the very creators whose work forms the foundation of the technology.

Is There a Middle Ground?

The debate doesn't have to be a binary choice between embracing AI completely or rejecting it outright. Many writers are finding a middle ground, using AI for certain tasks beyond a complete ghostwriter. For example, writers have been incorporating AI into:

• Ideation: Creating ideas and expanding on them through an AI interaction, or spotting flaws in their concepts before starting in earnest.
• Research: Using AI to quickly research information, particularly for writers of historical fiction.
• Editing: Analyzing their manuscripts to find strengths and flaws across structure, pacing, prose, and more.

At Inkshift, we believe there's a difference between using AI to analyze a manuscript as opposed to churning out an entire manuscript with a prompt. But every writer must decide for themselves where they stand on the use of AI in their work—whether for planning, researching, editing, drafting, or not at all.

While the ethical lines are still being drawn in courtrooms and in public opinion, one thing is certain: these tools exist, and they are here to stay. Wasting time arguing whether they should exist is less productive than engaging with the complex reality of their presence. The crucial task for the modern writer is to understand the capabilities, the benefits, and ethics, and to forge a path forward that aligns with their own creative and moral compass.