Organize what you have already made
Cluster your own notes, clean a transcript of your own speech, or turn a meeting record into a list of decisions. Read the result against the source before relying on it.
Field note 03
You DecideWhat Goes Where
Practical boundaries for authors using artificial intelligence.
A tool can support the work without becoming the source of its imagination, language, or authority. The writer remains responsible for the voice, the facts, the permissions, and the consequences.
The argument
A writer may delegate a task. The writer cannot delegate responsibility for the work.
AI is a blunt instrument compared to the human imagination and an author's power with words.
The useful boundary is not between technology and purity. It is between assistance and substitution. A practice has integrity when it preserves the writer's thinking, protects other people's work, and leaves responsibility with a human being.
Support
Tasks that can carry the work.
Lower-risk uses keep generated material outside the manuscript and place human judgment before and after the tool.
Ask structural questions
Use a tool to identify repetition, gaps, contradictions, or unanswered questions. Keep the diagnosis separate from the prose, and decide for yourself what the work needs.
Perform mechanical checks
Spelling, grammar, formatting, and syntax checks can support revision when the system is appropriate for confidential work and does not retain your manuscript for training.
Find research leads
Use generated responses only to suggest search terms, archives, or possible avenues. Follow every claim back to a reliable primary source.
Reduce administrative friction
Draft schedules, sort task lists, format information, or summarize non-confidential material so that more of your attention remains available for the book.
Slow down
Uses that need stronger boundaries.
These tasks can change the book, expose protected material, or create obligations that are easy to miss.
Brainstorming and outlining
A generated possibility can quietly become the book's first assumption. Begin with your own questions and material. If you use a tool, treat its suggestions as disposable prompts, never as creative authority.
Unpublished and confidential work
Do not upload manuscripts, interviews, client documents, private correspondence, or another person's work until you understand retention, training, access, and deletion settings and have permission to share it.
Voice and developmental feedback
Requests to improve, rewrite, or make prose more marketable can flatten the very qualities that make the work yours. Ask for questions or observations instead of replacement sentences.
Collaboration
Editors, coaches, ghostwriters, researchers, translators, and designers should disclose their use of generative systems. Put limits and approval requirements in writing before the work begins.
Publisher and award rules
Policies differ and continue to change. Check your contract, submission terms, award eligibility, and publisher guidance before using generated material in any deliverable.
Stop
Uses that surrender authorship or trust.
These practices ask a machine to perform the creative or ethical responsibility that belongs to the writer.
Do not present generated prose as your writing
Copying generated sentences, paragraphs, scenes, or dialogue into a manuscript and claiming human authorship breaks trust and may create contractual or copyright problems.
Do not outsource your voice
Do not ask a system to imitate another writer or to manufacture a version of your voice. Style is not surface decoration. It is the record of a mind making choices.
Do not rely on unverified claims
Generated citations, quotations, biographies, dates, and summaries can be false. Never publish a claim you have not traced to a trustworthy source and understood yourself.
Do not surrender accountability
A system cannot be the author, accept liability, grant permission, or answer to a reader. The person whose name is on the work remains responsible for every word and consequence.
Do not use another person's work without consent
Do not upload someone else's manuscript or private material, or use a writer's work to mimic their style, without their informed permission.
Five rules for integrity
Keep responsibility visible.
Keep generation human
The ideas, language, rhythm, images, judgments, and emotional movement of the manuscript remain the writer's work.
Verify at the source
Treat every generated claim as an unconfirmed lead. Read the primary record before the claim enters your thinking or your pages.
Protect what is entrusted to you
Know what a system stores and learns from. Obtain consent before sharing another person's words, identity, or experience.
Disclose what matters
Tell agents, publishers, collaborators, registries, and readers about substantive generated material when policy, contract, law, or trust requires it.
Remain accountable
You decide what the work says, what evidence supports it, who may be affected, and whether the finished book still reflects your values.
Before using a system
Six questions to ask first.
- 01
Is this task support for my thinking, or a substitute for it?
- 02
Am I sharing material that belongs to someone else or that must remain confidential?
- 03
Could this output enter the manuscript directly or shape its voice without my full understanding?
- 04
Can I verify every factual claim against a reliable primary source?
- 05
Do my contract, publisher, client, institution, or award rules permit this use?
- 06
Would I be comfortable describing this use plainly to a reader?
A plain-language disclosure
Say what the tool did. Say what it did not do.
This work was written by [author]. [Tool] was used for [specific supporting task]. No generated prose was incorporated into the manuscript. All creative decisions, source verification, and final language are the author's own.
Adapt this statement to the actual use. If generated material appears in the work, speak with your agent, publisher, or qualified legal adviser and follow the relevant disclosure and registration requirements.
Guidance consulted
Authors Guild
AI Best Practices for Authors
The Writers' Union of CanadaArtificial Intelligence Positions
Canadian Intellectual Property OfficeCopyright, Artificial Intelligence and Data
U.S. Copyright OfficeCopyright and Artificial Intelligence
This page offers professional orientation, not legal advice. Copyright, privacy, contract, and disclosure requirements vary by jurisdiction and continue to develop.
Keep close
Delegate the task. Never the responsibility.