Over the past few weeks, I’ve been following and engaging in conversations on social media about AI and writing. Again and again, the same critics show up—people I’ll call the purists.
The purists believe that writing with AI is illegitimate. Their objections usually fall into two categories: one moral, the other romantic.
1. The Myth of Theft
Many comments insist that using AI to write is theft. The reasoning goes like this: since AI models were trained on large datasets that included copyrighted text, anything they produce must be plagiarized.
But here’s the thing: that’s not how creativity works.
Every writer has read books. Every writer has absorbed styles, rhythms, and structures from others. We do not write in a vacuum. We carry every sentence we’ve ever read into every sentence we write.
AI works the same way. It recombines patterns. It synthesizes. It doesn’t copy wholesale in the way these critics imagine. And legally, the picture is more nuanced than they suggest: one federal judge has already said that training on legally acquired books can qualify as fair use, while disputes about pirated data are still being fought (and in some cases settled). What’s at issue is how companies obtained training data—not whether AI output is plagiarism.
So when purists claim AI is “stealing,” what they really mean is: I’m allowed to learn from the work of others, but the machine is not. That’s not a moral standard. That’s a double standard.
2. The Cult of Suffering
The other objection I keep seeing is more emotional. Purists insist that “real writing” requires blood, sweat, and tears. If AI is involved, the book is somehow illegitimate—because the author hasn’t suffered enough.
This is romantic nonsense.
If a writer could produce the same book without months of agony, who wouldn’t take that option? Do we honestly believe people would say, “No thanks, I’d rather suffer”? Yes, struggle can teach valuable lessons—but it is not a prerequisite for creativity. Believing otherwise is like thinking that doing drugs will turn you into your favorite musician. Struggle, like substances, can shape experience, but it is not the source of talent, vision, or craft.
And let’s be honest: anyone who’s worked with AI knows it’s not some frictionless shortcut. The tools fail often. They give incoherent answers. They push you to reframe your question, to refine, to cut, to shape. That is not the absence of struggle. That is a different kind of struggle.
The real work of writing has always been in the decisions: what to keep, what to cut, what to mean. AI doesn’t eliminate that. If anything, it intensifies it.
The Reality of Aithorship
The purists on social media want to believe that AI dissolves the human role. In reality, it magnifies it. Without human presence, AI is just nothing. With human vision, it becomes an instrument—one that requires shaping, steering, and judgment.
The authorship is still human. The authorship is still yours.
So no, using AI doesn’t erase the blood, sweat, and tears. It just relocates them—out of the slog of typing every letter, and into the deeper challenge of asking: What is worth saying? What deserves to last?
Ronin Volf