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Another Reason Not to Use "AI" For Your Writing

Posted on July 31, 2026

Posted by John Scalzi

42 Comments

1. Newer writers, just don't fucking use "AI" for anything, ever2. How odd that being an established writer with a firm "no 'AI'" stance and ample pre-"AI" IP will become a definite competitive advantage over "new, hot, and possibly copyright compromised"deadline.com/2026/07/ai-q…<br>— John Scalzi (@scalzi.com) 2026-07-31T10:56:05.029Z

Back in February I did a long post about "AI" and why I wouldn’t use it for my own writing, and one of the reasons I gave was "the fact that ‘AI’-generated text is not copyrightable and I don’t want any issues of ownership clouding my work." Well guess what? A hot and buzzy debut novel has been pulled from publishing and film/TV consideration over concerns that "AI" was used to make it. Here is one of the relevant bits from the article:

"Basically, questions were raised over whether the author used AI as a tool in the writing of the book. The problem: publishers and movie companies may not be able to register copyright and come away with a clear title chain if there are certain AI elements in the mix. That’s because AI-aided copy is an amalgamation of many other copyrighted works.

"From what I’m hearing, this will be an important teaching moment for writers with aspirations to become serious bankable authors. The lesson: stay the hell away from AI."

Am I feeling smug about having called this six months out? Yes, a little, but mostly not. I don’t deserve credit for noting this would be an issue because it was already a clear legal point: "AI"-generated work is not copyrightable, so if you have any "AI"-generated work in your material you open the door to legal issues. But also, the concern here is slightly different: The issue appears not to be that "AI" material isn’t copyrightable, the issue is that "AI" is trained on copyrighted material, so prose generated from it could be contested by the original copyright holders.

Now, from a practical point of view this could be a stretch to prove unless the "AI" farts out entire paragraphs of prose unaltered from its training material (which, to be clear, it can do and has done), and those end up in the finished book. But if you’re a lawyer for a publisher or a film/TV production house, even the hint of possible legal entanglement is enough to raise the shields. It’s already in contracts for both film/TV and for publishing houses that the author attests their work is wholly original, so, again, any hint that anything is other than that brings things to a screeching halt. As we have seen.

This is a situation that is now always on the table for writers, particularly newer writers with no track record and nothing available for publishers and producers to judge their work against. How do newer writers fight against an allegation of using "AI" to write their work? Publishers and producers are now trying to vet new work with "‘AI’ checkers," but the problem with those is that they are also "AI," and they are unreliable as fuck, so we’re back to where we started. It’s a bad situation. Not great for any writer these days! But again, especially so for newer writers without a backlog of pre-"AI" material at their disposal that can, at least, show the writer was already writing without assistance for years.

And in fact, as I note above in the attached Bluesky post, I think that for the reasonably near future, it’s possible that older works — ones written prior to, say, November 2022, when ChatGPT made its public debut — will become more desirable for film/TV optioning and adaptation, because they were clearly written without "AI" assistance, and there is a clear chain of title when it comes to copyright. Why bother with new stuff you can’t be confident about? Or, if you are going to bother with new stuff, you’re going to go to the new stuff from the writers who have lots of old stuff (i.e., could obviously write without "AI" assistance). If they have a long-standing and public "No-‘AI'" stance, so much the better. Which is great for writers like, uhhhhhh, me, and don’t think I haven’t already suggested so to my film/TV reps. But, again, it’s not great for newer writers.

Which is unfair. It’s not fair that newer writers will have to prove (to a larger extent than more established writers) that they can actually write, and that what they’ve written is actually their own work, not the result of a prompt. It’s especially unfair when the makers of the tools writers use to write — I’m looking at you, Microsoft and Google — are frantically stuffing "AI" tools into the programs writers rely on. No, Microsoft, I don’t fucking want Copilot to "help me write" in Word, and no, Google, I don’t fucking want Gemini to "help me write" in Google Docs. The very fact these "AI"s are hovering around my writing at all is bad enough from a...