Sigh...and then AI.
Image courtesy of ChatGPT
(Note to reader: I direct my blogs toward entrepreneurs, coaches, and/or experts writing nonfiction books to use as business assets, but my suggestions are still applicable to anyone writing a fiction novel, memoir, short story, etc.)
My stance on AI, right up front
Let's get one thing straight, right up front: I don't condone using generative AI to write your copy for you. Period.
However, I do condone, and encourage, using AI as a tool. (Full disclosure - I used AI to create the image for this post.)
Now that that's out of the way, and you've self-vetted whether you want to keep reading, let's dig in, shall we?
The AI elephant in the room
I know you've thought it...“Why wouldn’t I just write with AI?”
There is, of course, a tremendous debate raging amongst authors, creatives, publishers, and the world at large when it comes to writing…to AI, or not to AI, and in what capacity? There is fear - especially of late, what with AI agents starting to escape their sandboxes - and those fears are well and truly justified.
But having also read books like Life 3.0, by Max Tegmark, and The Coming Wave, by Mustafa Suleyman (with Michael Bhaskar), it is abundantly clear to me that AI is absolutely not going away. Ever. Even constrained by current infrastructure limitations, it’s developing at a breakneck speed. To put your head in the sand when it comes to the enormity of AI – both the potential upsides and down – is opportunity lost.
I am firm on my stance that AI can provide an invaluable service to businesses, regardless of size. It can provide ideas, direction, summaries, charts, images, videos, research, drafts, and beyond that, unbelievable marketing tools to give you massive boosts in time, productivity, and sales. I use AI in these capacities, and I encourage you to do the same.
However - and that's a big "however" - everything I've outlined in the paragraph above maximizes AI as a tool, not as a replacement of you as the writer of your business book.
Besides the obvious fact that AI isn’t going to hold you accountable (consider a book coach!), as of this writing, your buddies ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Copilot, et al., all fall short on several fronts that are highly germane to the writing of your book. It’s with these shortcomings in mind that I strongly condemn writing your book using only an AI chatbot or agent.
AI cannot write in your voice.
Think, for a moment, about how you build your relationships with your clients. How do you earn their trust? How do you relate to them, and them to you? I’ll give you a hint: We’ve been doing it from the first interactions we’ve had amongst ourselves hundreds of thousands of years ago. Yep…stories.
Whether by grunting, gesturing, or explaining how a saber-toothed tiger almost (but not quite!) snacked on your leg for lunch, we communicated, learned from each other, and bonded through our personal stories and voices.
For example, I’m willing to bet you’ve had some crazy client experiences or interactions in your life. You know who I’m talking about…that one hoarder client with 23 cats? Or that time a woman insisted the mannequin by her side was her husband? Then think of your favorite client experiences, like that time you loaned a young couple money to set up their restaurant business, which eventually became a huge franchise, and how they credited their success to you. You could certainly try to feed your AI chatbot or agent your hilarious, heart-wrenching, or feel-good stories, but if you’re going to do that, why wouldn’t you just write them yourself?
Moreover, if you’ve used AI at all, you will have noticed that AI writes in its own distinctive voice, especially if you don’t have extensive prompt experience or haven’t customized a set of specific writing instructions. Much of the time, responses reek of inauthenticity, which, naturally, severely erode trust with prospective clients.
AI is too often wrong.
You may have heard of “AI hallucinations,” in which generative AI models confidently present incorrect, misleading, or nonsensical responses. It often happens with math, but the issue cuts broadly across news and science. For example, in October 2025, the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) and the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) published a detailed study demonstrating that AI assistants misrepresent news content 45% of the time, regardless of language or territory. Of note, the study found that Google’s Gemini had “significant” issues in 76% of its responses, mostly due to poor sourcing of information (British Broadcasting Corporation, 2025).
Another 2025 study by Uwe Peters (Utrecht University) and Benjamin Chin-Yee (Western University and University of Cambridge) found that the AI chatbots driven by large language models (LLMs) – which are most of the ones we use – overgeneralized scientific results in 26–73% of nearly 5,000 cases tested, “even when explicitly prompted for accuracy and across multiple tests” (Conclusion section, para 1). Yikes!
But that’s not all. Peters and Chin-Yee comment, “Notably, newer models exhibited significantly greater inaccuracies in generalization than earlier versions.” They conclude, “These findings suggest a persistent generalization bias in many LLMs, i.e., a tendency to extrapolate scientific results beyond the claims found in the material that the models summarize…”
In human speak? If you’re going to use AI for research, check the sources you’re provided thoroughly, lest you inaccurately claim that Disney World has opened a new resort in the Alpha Centauri star system.
Tame the AI elephant
There are other limitations of using AI to write your book. Confidentiality, the risk of social isolation, the disconcertingly sycophantic nature of AI – even when prompted not to agree – and AI’s frequent lack of judgement about what will land with your clients all top the list.
All that, and yes, I still absolutely encourage the use of AI as a supplemental tool to enhance your professional and personal brand. Use it for brainstorming and research. Use it to consider ideas on how to clarify or explain concepts that you’re finding difficult to write, or as a thought partner. Use resources like Canva to help you spin up rapid marketing campaigns.
But don’t give up your human-level relatability and critical thinking that your book and clients deserve. Your book will define your personal brand and has the potential to springboard you into any myriad number of paid opportunities – talks, conferences, podcasts, even future books!
We encourage our clients to balance their use of AI as a tool with their own writing. At the completion of every client manuscript, we leverage one of the most sophisticated human-certification platforms, Verify My Writing, to ensure that their writing achieves a human score of 95. With that score, our clients receive, and can include in their manuscript, a downloadable certificate.
Be sure that your writing reflects your true voice. Use AI as a tool, not a replacement for you or your copy.
Your Move!
Roland Media is a publishing consulting firm and offers three premium packages and group coaching to help business experts write books that elevate their brand, reputation, and opportunities. All packages use the Start Messy, Finish Mighty method, a step-by-step, science-based process that uses time-tested business principles to bring your human expertise and experience to the world - faster, and more efficiently. We always conduct a free 30 minute consultation to determine if we're a mutual fit prior to engaging a client. All of our clients keep 100% of their royalties and earnings from any book or related sales.
