What should authors never use AI for?
- Never use AI to replace your voice in the prose you want to call yours.
- Never use AI in ways that are plagiarism-adjacent — reproducing another author’s style or text.
- Never treat AI output as factually certain without verifying every claim.
- AI hallucinates citations, quotes, dates, and laws with total confidence.
- Never paste confidential or unpublished work into a tool you have not vetted for privacy.
Authors should never use AI to replace their own voice in finished prose, never use it for plagiarism-adjacent shortcuts like mimicking a living author or reproducing copyrighted text, and never treat its output as factually certain. AI is a confident liar about facts and a flattening force on voice. Use it to diagnose and research; do not let it author the sentences or vouch for the truth.
Chapter i·Why it matters
Each of these misuses fails in a way that is hard to undo. Voice replacement produces prose readers describe as flat without knowing why. Plagiarism-adjacent prompting creates legal and ethical exposure. Trusting AI facts puts invented quotes and wrong dates into print under your name. The speed AI offers is real, but it disappears the moment you have to recall a book or rebuild reader trust.
Chapter ii·What to include
- A no-AI zone for the prose and dialogue you want in your own voice.
- A rule against prompting AI to imitate a specific living author.
- A fact-check pass on every name, date, quote, statistic, and legal claim.
- A privacy check before any manuscript touches an unvetted tool.
- A human-decision rule so nothing ships that you cannot personally stand behind.
- A disclosure plan for the contexts that require it.
Chapter iii·Example
A nonfiction author asks AI to draft a chapter and it produces three plausible-looking citations. Two of the studies do not exist. She catches it because her rule is to verify every source before it enters the draft. Had she trusted the output, her book would have shipped with fabricated research — the kind of error that ends a nonfiction author’s credibility in a single review.
WriteLoom is built around a simple line: AI diagnoses and researches, you write and decide. It stays out of your prose and flags where you still need to verify.
See how WriteLoom uses AI