Anytime you bring up AI in a discussion about creative writing these days, you get the immediate impression that the atmosphere has changed. Moral outrage strikes straight away, and the verdict is instant: you aren’t a real writer. You just let AI generate your work. Just to be perfectly clear, this post is about AI-assisted writing and not about passing off fully AI generated writing as your own.

The internet is definitely full of lifeless, machine-produced content — stories lacking any real emotion and prose that sounds as if it’s been randomly squawked out by a parrot. If that’s all AI-assisted writing amounted to, I’d be holding a pitchfork too. But this is not what happens when an author uses AI as a tool to aid the creative process and bring a deeply human vision to life.

Although discussions concerning digital photography or music production have looked at similar changes, the analogy I continually return to isn’t about software or sound. It’s about sewing.

A 19th-Century Panic

When Barthélemy Thimonnier constructed one of the first practical sewing machines in 1830, Parisian tailors felt so threatened that they set his factory on fire. To them, the art of sewing consisted of hand-stitching — using a needle and thread and making each stitch with great care. A machine capable of stitching more quickly was not viewed as a tool, but as a serious threat to the craft itself. The logic was simple: if you used a machine, you couldn’t be considered a true tailor.

The resistance was intense and, looking back, completely mistaken about what it was really protecting.

Consider what a skilled tailor or seamstress actually does today. They look at a pattern — either a commercial one or one they drafted themselves — and see possibilities a beginner wouldn’t. They know which alterations will make the garment hang more elegantly, where to take in a seam to suit the shape of the body, and how to modify the neckline to turn something ordinary into something personal. They select the fabric, plan the order of construction, and sit down at the sewing machine to execute their vision.

The machine does the stitching, but the machine doesn’t choose the pattern, select the fabric, or decide when to depart from the instructions. When a skilled tailor makes a dress using a machine and a beginner tries the same pattern on the same machine, the results are dramatically different — because the expertise wasn’t in the mechanical operation of the stitch. It lay in the vision, the planning, and the countless small decisions made before and during the process.

Imagine a seamstress with an automated embroidery machine — a device programmed to execute a pattern automatically. No one doubts her skill when she wears the completed garment that she had tailored and embroidered. It is clear from the outcome that she displayed vision, judgment, and expertise at every stage, even if the machine carried out the repetitive work.

The Parallel Pattern

Substitute “sewing machine” with “AI” and “garment” with “novel.”

The similarity is striking. In my own writing process, I establish the pattern — the story structure, the character psychology, and the emotional journey. I select the fabric — the themes, the setting, and the voice. I make the structural changes, altering the dialogue and deciding where the narrative needs to slow down or breathe. The AI does the stitching by assisting in drafting prose based on my detailed instructions that live alongside the novel outline, the character sheets, scene notes, the beats within a scene, threads of subplots, and the emotional architecture of the story.

Just as buying a sewing machine and a bolt of fabric doesn’t make someone a skilled tailor, having access to an AI model doesn’t make someone a novelist. It takes narrative intent, emotional strategy, and the sound judgment to know when the machine’s output should be deleted and rewritten.

Writing a novel requires distinct creative abilities — character psychology, emotional strategy, world-building, and structural design — that have no connection with the physical act of producing sentences. To regard AI-assisted writing as “not real writing” is equivalent to pretending that individual stitches make up the entire garment. They don’t. They are merely the final stage in a much larger creative process.

Does the Story Have a Soul?

The debate usually gets stuck on a single question: “Is it cheating?”

A much better question is: Does the story possess a human soul?

Was there something a human being experienced, witnessed, or imagined that they felt urgently driven to express? Did they deliberately work with that material, directing each scene toward an emotional truth, even if they used a tool for the sentence-level execution?

If the answer is yes, then the story belongs to them. Everyone has stories shaped by their unique, irreplaceable experience of being alive, but there can be a wide gap between what people feel and what they are able to put on the page. If an assistive tool can reduce that gap — just as the sewing machine did for garment making — that isn’t the destruction of art; it’s liberation.

In the context of AI assisted writing, AI is no more than a sewing machine. The garment itself is still entirely human.

[ Originally published on Medium: Link ]