I read a client's AI chapters twice looking for something nice to say

A client sent me two chapters he had drafted with ChatGPT, and he was proud of them. I read them twice trying to find something kind to say. They were garbage. Not offensively bad, which would at least have been interesting. Worse than that. They were flat. Clean grammar, tidy structure, every paragraph sitting politely next to the last one, and nobody home.

I didn’t argue with him about it. I rewrote the chapters in his voice, set the two versions side by side, and he never mentioned AI again. He didn’t need a lecture. He needed to see it, and once he saw it he couldn’t unsee it.

I keep coming back to that moment, because the whole industry is busy having the wrong argument. One camp says using AI to write is cheating and you are going straight to hell. The other says it is just a tool, calm down, it’s basically spellcheck. Both of them think the question is whether the machine was in the room.

It isn’t. The question is the same one it has always been. Is the book any good.

Here is the part that took me a while to see clearly. The backlash against AI books is real, but watch what actually triggers it. A reader hits something that reads dead, goes looking for why, and finds the machine. The badness comes first. The AI is the explanation they land on second. A genuinely good book almost never gets dragged into that, because nobody goes looking for a problem they cannot feel.

So I draw a hard line in my own work, and it is not about purity. I use AI to organize interviews, build summaries, handle email. The book itself, every word, is human, because the machine produces the exact hollow thing that gets a book rejected, and my whole job is to produce the opposite.

I wrote the long version this week, the backlash, what the machine actually puts on the page, and why you can’t fix it by sprinkling humanity on top. If you want it: https://thewritingking.com/not-the-ai-its-the-crap/

Richard