What AI is actually good for in a first draft (and what to keep for yourself)

I should say up front that I build writing software with AI in it, so you can read this with whatever suspicion you like. But I am going to argue mostly for restraint, which is not the argument you would expect from me, and that is because I have watched what happens to drafts on both sides of the line.

The conversation about AI and fiction tends to collapse into two camps. One camp says the machine is theft and poison and should never touch a manuscript. The other camp says resistance is sentimental and the tools are simply the new typewriter. Most working writers I know live in neither camp. A University of Cambridge study of published novelists found that about a third already use AI somewhere in their process, almost always for what the researchers called non-creative tasks, while nearly all of them, 97 percent, were strongly against AI writing the novel itself. That is not confusion. I think it is the right instinct, stated as a statistic. The useful question is not whether to use AI in a first draft. It is where.

Here is the map I would offer, after a few years of watching writers work with these tools.

AI is good at the jobs that surround the writing. It is a fast research assistant for the questions that stop a drafting session cold: how long a sailing ship took from Lisbon to Boston, what a 1970s hospital ward smelled like, what month cherry trees bloom in Kyoto. You still have to verify what it tells you, the same way you would verify a stranger's answer in a forum, because these systems state wrong things with the same confidence as right things. But getting a plausible answer in ten seconds, instead of falling into an hour of browser tabs, keeps you inside the scene. Research during drafting should be a quick errand, not a field trip.

It is good at holding the boring memory of the book. By chapter twenty you will not remember the eye color you gave a minor character in chapter three, or what day of the week the story is on. Asking a tool to check your own manuscript for these things is honest work. Nothing creative is outsourced. You are using the machine as a concordance, which is what machines have been good at for a long time.

It is good as a wall to throw ideas against. When a plot problem has you stuck, asking for ten possible ways the scene could go will usually produce seven bad ideas, two obvious ones, and occasionally a collision you had not considered. The value is not that the machine is imaginative. The value is that bad options are clarifying. Writers have always used a patient friend for this. The friend is now available at two in the morning, and plot problems often show up at two in the morning.

And it is good, carefully, as a reader of what you already wrote. "Summarize this chapter" is a strangely useful request, because if the summary surprises you, the chapter is not doing what you believed it was doing. The machine read what is on the page, not what is in your head, and that gap is exactly what a first draft hides from its author.

Now the other side of the map. What to keep for yourself.

Keep the sentences. This is the center of it, and I want to be plain about why, because "the machine writes badly" is not the real reason. The machine writes smoothly, and that is worse. A first draft is where your voice gets built, sentence by sentence, through all the slightly wrong attempts. When you let a model produce the prose and then edit it, you skip those attempts, and what you get is fluent text that sounds like everyone, because it was trained on everyone. I have read AI-drafted chapters that had no visible flaw and no detectable person behind them. A reader cannot always say why such a chapter feels empty. But readers put books down over feelings they cannot name.

Keep the first telling of every scene. There is a version of each scene that only exists in you, with its specific wrong details and private logic, and it only comes out the first time you write it. If a machine writes the scene first, your version does not get displaced. It simply never arrives, and you will spend revision polishing a scene you never actually wrote.

Keep the decisions. What the book is about, who deserves the ending, what gets cut. A model will answer any of these questions if you ask. It will answer them reasonably. Reasonable is the problem. Books become themselves through unreasonable choices that one particular person insisted on, and a draft steered by consensus answers converges on the expected book, which is the book nobody needed you for.

If you want a single test for the gray cases, here is mine. Ask whether the task, done badly by you, would still teach you something about your book. Writing a clumsy version of a scene teaches you the scene. Choosing a weak word teaches you what the strong word has to do. Those tasks are yours, because the failure is part of the work. Looking up ship schedules badly teaches you nothing about your book. Checking an eye color by hand teaches you nothing. Those tasks you can hand over without losing anything that was ever yours.

One more honest note. Disclosure rules are real and getting stricter. Some publishers and some self-publishing platforms now ask authors to declare AI involvement, and the definitions differ from one to the next. If you follow the map above, the question stays easy to answer, because the words are yours. If the machine drafted your chapters, the question becomes uncomfortable, and I think the discomfort is information.

I will admit where I stand, since I promised suspicion at the start. When we built Psitta, we made a deliberate choice that the AI would help around the manuscript, with research, continuity, and reading your draft back to you, and would not be a button that writes chapter five. Some users have asked for that button. We have not built it, for the reasons in this essay.

The writers I have seen use these tools well all share one habit. They treat the machine as staff, not as a co-author. Staff can fetch, check, remind, and listen. The author writes. Keep that arrangement and the tools will give you hours back without taking anything that matters. Reverse it, and you will finish faster, and you will have finished someone else's book.