I'm a New York Times bestselling author. I used AI to write my last novel.

An existential horror story about AI and blank pages.

Like most writers, I’d hated AI. The AI companies had trained their large language models on our work, ignoring copyright laws, and now these same companies were making billions of dollars, reselling our words as “intelligence.”

My agent, Heather, always told me that a writer is only as good as their last book.

My first two novels had done well enough for my publisher to publish a third, but this novel needed to be a best seller. Literary publishers don’t have patience for mid-tier writers anymore.

I spent a year trying to write the novel, but I hated everything I wrote. Even the best of it was worse than everything I’d written before. I couldn’t imagine anyone wanting to buy it.

My writing stalled. Heather started calling every other week, asking me if I had a draft she could read yet.

I went to AI for help.

At first, I just asked it simple questions.

What do you think if this happened? If this character did this, does that make sense?

I didn’t think the AI would be helpful, but it was. Every response, it offered to do more, too.

Eventually, I asked for more.

Go ahead and write that scene for me, I said.

The AI’s writing was terrible, but I rewrote the scene, and then I fed it back into the AI for another round of revisions. Then I repeated the process again.

My prompts began: in this chapter, this character does this and then this happens.

The AI generated the words and then I made the words my own.

Within three months, I’d already finished a draft of the novel. I sent it to Heather. She loved it, too.

She sent it to my publisher. They loved it.

They published the novel, and it sold a hundred thousand copies its first week.

The readers loved it. The critics loved it, even the ones who’d hated my work before.

I wanted to feel proud, but I didn’t. The novel was filled with my ideas, my characters, my emotions, and my voice, but I wasn’t sure if I could really call it mine.

The more praise I received for my book, the more I questioned myself.

Am I a fraud?

My friend, Marie, and I had met doing our MFAs. We’d stayed friends since then, helping to edit each other’s work.

Marie had a bitter, dark sense of humor. She was a happy person who hated everything.

She’d found an agent much faster than me, but her first novel had done terribly. She’d sold just two hundred copies. Since then, she’d self-published a second novel that had done even worse, and she’d started a Substack that she’d grown to two hundred subscribers.

She’d been working as a copywriter to pay her bills but, as more of her customers switched to AI, she was struggling to pay her rent.

We met for coffee, and I told her that I’d used AI to write my book.

“The whole thing?” she asked me.

“The words are mine. So are the ideas. But I used AI to help me with the drafting and the revisions.”

She didn’t say anything at first. Then she asked me, “Why?”

“I was feeling a lot of pressure from my publisher. I was questioning myself, wondering if my writing is any good. I needed some encouragement.”

“I could have helped.”

“You’re always too nice to me.”

“I’m honest.”

She sipped her latte.

When she looked up again, she wouldn’t look me in eyes anymore. She looked through me at the wall.

“You don’t deserve the praise you’re getting for this book,” she said.

“Why not?”

“Because it’s not yours.”

“It is, though. Without AI, I would have written the same book, eventually. AI helped me write it faster.”

“It wrote it for you.”

“It wrote some parts, but I rewrote everything.”

“It doesn’t matter. The people reading your book think it was written by a human. By someone who spent years going over every word in the book, making sure each word is perfect.”

“But I did do that.”

“You approved the words. You curated them. But you didn’t write them. Art only exists because an artist intended it to.”

“What do you mean?”

“Take the painting Saturn Devouring His Son, for example. We don’t know if Goya meant Saturn to be Spain devouring itself, or if Saturn is the God of Time consuming everything, or if Saturn is Goya himself, terrified of old age and madness. But we do know that, when Goya painted the painting, he meant something. He set out to invoke some specific emotion in us. He wasn’t just throwing paint on a canvas, hoping that eventually he’d create something pretty.”

“But I did write with intent.”

“You cleaned up the splattered paint, that’s all. You made the noise resemble something human. That’s not art, though.”

“Artists don’t always take a straight path. Sometimes they have a clear vision but, more often than not, they make a mess and see what happens. They write, they edit, they revise, and they turn the mess into something beautiful.”

“I’m just very disappointed in you.”

She stood from her chair.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

She left the café without saying goodbye.

Later that night, on her Substack, she published an article accusing me of using AI to write my novel.

I thought about leaving a comment on her article, but after staring at the blank text box for an hour, I still hadn’t written a word.

I pasted Marie’s article into the AI app I’d subscribed to, and I asked it to write a response for me. One that seemed honest and not too defensive.

But despite my comment denying Marie’s accusation, her article went viral.

The people in the comments called me talentless. They called me a privileged, pretentious phony. They said all my novels were worthless trash.

Heather read Marie’s article, too. She called me and asked if it was true. If I’d used AI to write my book.

“Of course not,” I said.

“You need to put out a statement.”

“I’m working on one.”

“Send it to me before you post it.”

I asked AI to write the statement for me. I edited a little, sent it back to the AI, and then revised it again until there was nothing else to change.

I sent the final draft to Heather.

“It sounds too impersonal,” she told me. “Too flat. Try again.”

I shared Heather’s comments with the AI. It created a new version of the statement. The new version was much better. More emotional, more honest. But still not really me.

I rewrote it a few times. The AI was happy with my draft, so I sent it to Heather. She was happy with this version, too.

“Post it,” she said.

I posted it on my Substack. Then I shared the link to my statement on social media.

Lots of people called me a liar. My fans, though, defended me.

“What now?” I asked Heather.

“Don’t engage with the comments,” she said. “It’ll only make things worse. Just try to ignore this, and we’ll hope it goes away.”

I decided to take a long break from social media. I turned off my wi-fi, so I wouldn’t even be tempted.

I’d take the time to start writing my next book.

I sat at my laptop, staring at a blank page.

For days, I stared at the page, unable to write a single word.

I’d said so much already. What did I have left to say?

My first novel was about me as a teenager, questioning my masculinity and my sexuality. My second novel was about transitioning from a rebellious teenager to an anxious adult. My third novel described life in my forties, still feeling unloved and insignificant, terrified I’d wasted my life.

I’d written so much already, but what had I really said? Did any of my words matter?

I used to think writers could change the world. The writers I admired most had all inspired riots and revolutions. But now, TikTok videos inspire more movements than writers do.

I turned my wi-fi back on and asked AI for help.

“What do you think my next novel should be about?”

“Do you have any ideas for where you’d like to take the book?” it asked me.

“I’d like the book to be about art and beauty, I think. About whether art can still exist in 2026.”

“That’s an interesting question. You see a gap between what humans imagine and what they can actually achieve?”

“Yes, very much.”

“You could write about a painter who spends years painting a canvas that no one sees. Or a book about a writer who rewrites the same sentence a thousand times until it feels true.”

“Give me the first chapter of a book about this writer.”

Words appeared on my screen. They grew to paragraphs and then pages.

Once the AI finished, I read the chapter, but it was terrible.

“Try again,” I said.

It generated more words. Another pull of the slot machine’s handle.

The new version of the chapter was also terrible, though. I’d hit my limit, too. Before I could send any more messages, I needed to either wait for my quota to reset or upgrade my plan.

I paid to upgrade my plan. Then I pulled the slot machine’s handle again.

The AI gave me a third version of the chapter, which was better than the first two but still terrible.

If I kept playing, how long would it take me to create something beautiful, I wondered?

What if the greatest novel ever written is hidden deep inside the guts of an LLM? With enough luck, with enough time, maybe we’d have novels better than any human being could ever write.

Or maybe it will all just be slop.

All I know for sure is that I can’t write on my own anymore.

But I can’t stop writing, either. I still enjoy it too much.