Writing and self publishing in the age of AI can seem like a losing battle. With so many AI-constructed books out there (AI Slop), the large tech companies stealing your book content to train their models and unscrupulous thieves ‘creating’ their version of your book and selling it, it’s understandable that people considering writing and self publishing a book, non-fiction or fiction, just feel it’s not worth it anymore. No sooner than its shared with the world it gets stolen.
But all is not lost. In fact, self publishing your book might just be the very act that make us humans stand apart from what AI and the big tech companies can’t steal or replace. Jim Lee from DC Comics captured this perfectly:
“People have an instinctive reaction to what feels authentic. We recoil from what feels fake. That’s why human creativity matters.”
Like synthetic fibres synthetic writing and self publishing just doesn’t cut it. Something just ‘feels off’ and it is. For all it’s speed and capacity to search for information AI doesn’t and can’t interpret it in a deeper, meaningful way. AI is a predictive tool NOT an emotional one.
Lived experience (being human) has a signature that no amount of training data can reproduce. AI can mimic the output. It cannot replicate the journey, the mistakes, the emotion, the raw unfiltered moments of being a human, or synthesise seemingly unconnected thoughts, ideas, experiences.
We instinctively recognise when something essential is missing, even though it might fool us for a moment. Synthetic combinations of words, AI-created fake images of ourselves or others, synthetic voice overs in audio books and more are, well, poor reproductions as our imperfections are what make each of us unique.
These fakes can’t replace the lived experience that creates trust, connection, and meaning. And that experience is connecting with real humans, not a fake ones that can’t connect with us sincerely, with empathy, physical touch, warmth and vibrancy (despite what some in the AI world say). That is humanness.
And how does self publishing fit into humanness?
A book’s value comes from what it unlocks in the reader.
As Pia Lauritzen comments her article in Forbes:
The first sentence in Aristotle’s Metaphysics reads: “All men by nature desire to know.” And that’s actually all we need to know to understand why humans think:
We need to know that there is a gap between what we know and what we would like to know.
That we think because we know that there is something we don’t know – yet.
Humans think because we have a concrete experience that there is something important that we don’t know what is. Something that we are willing to invest our time and energy in finding out.
And the act of writing and self publishing is one way we humans still reach for to find out what we don’t know.
It’s the human written and self published book that creates the emotion, and it’s the emotion that creates everything else.
My advice to anyone worried about AI, writing and self publishing.
The question you should be asking yourself is what part of what you are writing and sharing through self publishing your book is irreplaceably humanly you?
What insights and experiences are you sharing that can’t be automated or replicated? What lived experiences, judgement, iterations of your advice informed by real human interactions make up your unique story, reputation and recognition?
This is what you share in your writing and self published book.
In a world of AI Slop, enshittification and information overload it’s your unique combination of knowledge, insight, skills, real videos, and taking the time to write (considered if you like ‘slow writing’) that will stand out and stand the test of time.
…and use AI tools
To be clear, I am not saying don’t use the myriad of AI tools that are now out there. I use AI tools across various aspects of my writing from transcribing interviews, testing book titles and subtitles, creating content marketing topics, testing chapter outlines, headings and key topics, drafting targeted media releases, doing customer segmentation and more. What I don’t use AI for is writing, or reference checking.
AI tools are not designed for long form writing, they lose track of the overall theme of a chapter and the different parts therein. It makes up references and citations if it can’t find any and tends to write in three-word descriptors/three-phase responses. Separately, there’s been a bit of a global discussion about AI’s overuse of the em dash. If you don’t know what one is, don’t worry. They’re quite useful in punctuation but should be used sparingly.
Some AI tools are better than others but we humans each have a particular style, tone, unique lived experience that only we can draw on to write about. And, more importantly, AI can’t envisage the emotional pathway options a human can choose/a human feels based on the insights and knowledge shared with them and experienced.
So, take heart. Pick up your pen, or open that blank Word document and start writing, or keep writing. Make 2026 the year you bring your humanness to an AI overloaded world.
Your writing is vital
As David Smart shares:
Ultimately, AI cannot replace the inward processes: the ability to make meaning, grow aware, navigate chaos, sense the body, express the self, create from a place of true nature, and experience the intrinsic rewards of walking a difficult path.
Using AI to write entire books might one day be seen as no different than taking inspiration from multiple books. But why give up the rare and precious opportunity to examine ourselves deeply in this one life we’ve been given? If we avoid what is difficult, we miss out on the real fruits of the practice: that there is something within us that wants to be expressed, known, and understood.
And, you might enjoy listening to this great song by The Killers, from a few years back: Are we human.
If you have some spare thinking and writing time over the Christmas/January break, and want some help with your writing and book planning, contact me as I’ll be finishing off my sixth book for the year!