He wrote it by hand. In a cell. Legal pads, mailed to me in batches, and I was the first person on earth to read a single word of it.
There’s a detail in chapter four I still think about. I’m not going to tell you what it is, because it’s his and not mine. What I will tell you is that no machine on this planet could have produced it, for one extremely boring reason.
No machine was there.
That is the entire argument about AI and books. Everything below is me showing my working, and being ruder about it than is strictly necessary.
Your fair hearing, robots. You get four sentences.
AI writes perfectly good sentences, quickly. It’ll hold a structure, match a tone, and hand you forty versions of your opening paragraph before your coffee goes cold. If your job was producing tidy prose on deadline, that job has changed and I’m not going to insult you by pretending otherwise. Anyone still saying “it can’t really write” has not looked in eighteen months.
Lovely. That’s the fair bit finished.
Producing sentences was never the difficult part.
Thirty years of this and I’d put it at maybe fifteen percent of the work. The other eighty-five is knowing which story to tell, in what order, and what to cut. You cannot do that from the outside. You have to have been in the room.
Your expertise is scrapable. Sorry.
The frameworks, the principles, the industry knowledge. All of it exists in ten thousand other places and the machine has read every single one. If your book is your expertise neatly arranged, a competent chatbot will produce something eighty percent as good in nine seconds and you will have spent a year losing that race.
What it cannot reach is the record of you being there. The client who nearly walked. The decision you got catastrophically wrong in 2011 and what it cost you. The thing you now do automatically because of what happened that year and never explain to anyone.
Nobody can scrape a life. They can only scrape what has already been written about lives, which is a thinner and sadder thing.
The part nobody mentions at the AI conferences
Purely AI-generated text cannot hold copyright. That is not my opinion, it is settled law. The DC Circuit held that the Copyright Act requires every eligible work to be authored in the first instance by a human being, and on 2 March 2026 the Supreme Court declined to look at it again.
So the “book” you generated over a weekend is not the asset you think it is. You can print it. You can sell it. You cannot own it the way you own something you made.
For most people that’s an abstraction they’ll never bump into. If you’re building an Author Empire, licensing, speaking, courses, a body of work with your name across all of it, then you have poured the foundation onto ground you don’t hold the deed to. That is a genuinely shit position and most of the people in it have no idea they’re in it.
Author Intelligence, and the only AI I’ll defend
I don’t use AI to write. Not a sentence, not a paragraph, not a “just to get me unstuck.” My clients pay for a human being who has done this for three decades. Swapping in a machine halfway through is a small fraud and I would rather not commit one.
Which leaves me watching an entire cottage industry sell “write your book in a weekend with AI” to people who deserve better. My honest view is that it’s bullshit. The tool isn’t the villain here. The problem is that what’s being sold is a book-shaped object, and the person buying it wanted a book.
There is a version I’ll happily defend. I call it Author Intelligence, largely so nobody confuses it with the other thing everyone is currently losing their minds about.
Author Intelligence is the machine as a thinking partner. Never a writing one. In practice:
- Hand it your chapter list and ask what argument you’re dodging. It is genuinely good at spotting the hole in a skeleton.
- Ask what has already been said, so you don’t spend six weeks confidently reinventing something with a Wikipedia page.
- Tell it to argue against you. Far more useful than showing your draft to a friend who loves you.
- Give it the joyless admin. Bibliographies. Transcript cleanup. Nobody’s soul is on the line.
What it never does is produce the words. The second it writes the prose, the thing that made the book worth reading is gone, and no amount of editing puts it back. Research assistant, yes. Body double, absolutely not.
One question, and you’ll know
Read whatever you’ve got. The draft, the outline, the idea you’ve been carrying since your kid started primary school and she’s now driving a car. Ask yourself one thing.
Could a machine have written this?
If yes, it genuinely doesn’t matter who did. It was already replaceable, and that was true long before ChatGPT turned up. If no, if the thing only exists because you were somewhere and noticed something and paid for it, then you don’t have a competitor problem. You’re holding the only thing in this entire industry that can’t be manufactured.
Most books fail that test for a reason that has nothing to do with expertise. People write the version they think sounds professional instead of the version that’s true. They sand off every specific until what’s left could have belonged to literally anyone. Then they wonder why it reads like AI garbage.
Four million books were published in the US last year. Three and a half million self-published, up nearly forty percent in twelve months, according to Bowker’s figures reported by Publishers Weekly. The market is drowning in competent, forgettable text and that is only going one direction.
Polish is free now. Everyone has it. The thing that stands out is a real person who has actually done the work, saying something only they could say, in a voice that couldn’t have come from anywhere else.
Harder to fake than it has ever been, which makes it worth more than it has ever been, and that is pretty fucking cool if you sit with it for a second.
Clayton had a pencil and something to say. Most of you have it the other way round, and I promise you that’s the harder problem to fix.
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