How I Use AI

April 24, 2026

Ahh… AI. The great boogeyman of the artistic world.

Use it, don’t use it, use it for some things. The communities of the world seem very divided on how much to let this into our spaces.

Here is how and where I use AI in my artistic journey.

First, I never use it for writing. What’s the point? I write for fun. Asking a robot to do it isn’t fun. 

I have used it for editing before. To be honest, I don’t find it very good at editing. It tries to change your voice far too much, and it loves saying things smell like ozone for some reason. Also, loves - these - double dash sentences. 

For editing, I do use AutoCrit and ProWritingAid. AutoCrit definitely has some AI functionality. I’m not sure about PWA. But with either program, I look at their suggestions and make changes based on my preference. I never let them run on their own.

Plotting wise, I’ve tried chatting with various bots about story ideas but I find them plain and sort of boring. AutoCrit does have a Beta-Reader feature I like to use where AI reads the manuscript and gives a ‘beta reader’ summary. It’s a high-level overview that points out story holes and things. It’s great. Again, I use it for suggestions, not for anything beyond that.

I do play with AI for marketing materials. I’ll ask it to mock up book descriptions to sharpen up my own marketing materials and things of that nature. I don’t like writing these. I heavily edit what AI comes up with. Usually I get a few from whatever bot and sort of Frankenstein together what I like. 

I’ll also use AI to do marketing research. What are my comparable titles, authors, etc. I never ask it to scrape other people’s works or anything of that nature. It’s much more surface level. For example, I recently asked it to give me a list of popular LitRPG authors and their websites. 

Book Covers. I don’t want to use AI for my covers. I’m a big believer in hiring cover designers or trying to do it myself. I have used AI to help with the initial designs. Typically I try to get my vision together before paying someone to create it. AI gives me a tool to quickly try out ideas. 

(I did pay a cover designer on Fiver… only to find out they used AI to make it anyway. How they had hundreds of 5-star reviews, I’ll never know.)

I imagine this will change and update as the technology does. I dated the top of this page and will do my best to update it anytime I update my system.

I’m sure AI has some wonderful use cases. But creative writing shouldn’t be one of them.