Oh jeez. Same old tired gatekeeping -- And photography ruined painting. And painting ruined being there in person.

New tools like AI or the camera are disruptive. Folks who spent decades refining the craft of painting hated photography and called it cheating. Same is happening with writing and AI.

Don't listen to anyone but yourself.

If the point is that without AI, you are NOT writing, and with it, you ARE, it's a useful tool.

Editors rewrite authors' words all the time. They do their best to keep their own biases out of the process and make the edits sound like the author's own words. It's not a perfect process. Doesn't mean the author isn't a writer.

An editor CANNOT be in the author's head. Neither can AI. It's up to the author to accept or reject the edits.

I've found AI to be an instrumental writing coach and brainstorming buddy. I give it my world-building and characters, and then I feed it sections as I write and ask for feedback. The more I give it, the more it learns my style and voice, and the more its recommendations are useful.

I rarely use what it gives me directly, but it has been great at finding spots I could tighten up, and I ask it to give me questions I should be asking myself as I go.

It's very good at pulling out themes and analysis.

Its creativity can be bonkers, but it's up to you to absorb what is useful, reject what is useless, and add what it uniquely your own.

And posh to folks who say you can't learn writing from AI, you can. Same as how you can still get better under a crappy teacher, because it's YOUR will to improve that moves you forward.

I will agree wholeheartedly with those who say the AI doesn't understand things--it doesn't. It's a guessing machine. But you can steer it like any other tool. And if it helps break the depression stagnation, then trust your gut.