To me, AI is a flawed but interesting tool, brought to us by the same flawed (and often corrupt) people who brought us the rest of the modern conveniences we live with. Other people have other opinions about it, and out of respect for them, I try to be transparent about my use of AI.

I do not use AI for first draft writing or for high-level concept and character background work. I have found ai chatbots (mostly Claude.ai) helpful for tasks like:

-dictation cleanup

-catching typos or flow issues in short excerpts

-as a sounding board for dealing with world-building details or writer’s block

-writing blurbs for my books and series

-suggesting improvements in the revision process

-I have also started using them for things like Amazon keyword and category optimization, although I don’t always take their advice.

With regards to other forms of AI, I find the art and music generators very interesting. I originally started playing around with Midjourney and Suno for fun rather than profit. Sometime in 2023, Midjourney had improved enough to make decent covers, or at least more on-point than what I had before. In the second half of 2025, I got interested in Midjourney animations, and rekindled an old interest in movie editing. I hope to start putting out promotional videos for the Hunter Healer King trilogy soon, after the third book releases.

I also have a series of “lore drop” posts talking about the characters and setting planned. I turned to an AI chatbot for marketing advice, on the theory that it couldn’t possibly know less about marketing than I do. It suggested only modest changes about the more character centered posts. Better opening hooks, more emphasis on what makes the characters unique, better division of paragraphs. For the blog posts about the world-building, I found myself less invested in using my exact first draft blog posts. I started letting the chatbot actually rewrite the material with an eye towards reader engagement and SEO. So far, I’ve still had to go back and tweak and rewrite the result. This is an experiment to see how useful this AI stuff is for book marketing, which is one of my least favorite aspects of writing. Fingers crossed.