Is it cheating to use AI to help with your writing projects?

The short answer is NO. (The longer answer is, of course, it depends. If you’re trying to pass off an AI-generated essay as your own original, well, you don't need me to tell you that's not okay.)

In fact, for me, AI can be a godsend.

You see, I struggle with many of the same things my coaching clients do. We have so many things in common. I’m only able to coach the way I do because I really know what that struggle is, from the inside.

Like so many of my clients, I still struggle with:

• The blank page
• Too much on the page
• Slogging through a great mess to weed out what’s important and what’s not
• Summarizing the most important bits
• Structuring the important bits
• Figuring out how the supporting bits fit together with the important bits
• Structuring the writing project

Any one of these things can make it simply impossible to move forward.

Here’s what writing often looks like for me:

I get stuck, can’t get started, then I panic and really can’t get started, can’t even imagine how I might get started, and then I really really panic. So then I might start doing more research, and then I have too much research, so I start writing but then I get confused and usually I write too much and then can’t make sense of it. And then I really really really panic and there’s no way I can even think about it anymore. I collapse in a heap and take the Scarlett O’Hara approach: I’ll think about that tomorrow. (It’s from Gone with the Wind — you’re welcome.)

Only true deadline pressure with truly catastrophic consequences can get me writing at this point. This is where I’ve always gotten stuck. I’ve done the best I can, but now I literally can’t move.

This is where AI can help – as a way to get unstuck.

Using AI to help move your writing along is a reasonable accommodation for neurodivergent brain wiring.

Here’s how I’ve used AI in the past few months.

The blank page: I ask AI to spit out a first draft. Even if I hate what it spits out, the page is no longer blank, and that’s major progress. My superpower is editing, and now I have something to work with. I’m unstuck.

Too much on the page, getting lost in the weeds, trouble summarizing: I ask AI to write me a summary. Even if it’s wrong, it gives me a starting point, and shows me where I need to shore up an argument, where I need to prune.

Structuring the important bits: I feed in a dog’s breakfast – or the AI’s own summary – and ask the bot to put the main points in some semblance of logical order.

Fitting the pieces together: I ask for a linear outline showing how everything is related to everything else, and following a line of reasoning from A to B to Z. Or if linear outlines give me a headache, I ask for a mind map.

Structuring the writing project: I ask for a schedule. I give the AI bot a timeframe and ask it to show me all the steps to meet my deadline, with benchmarks for accomplishing each step.

Editing and proofreading: I don’t personally struggle with these, so I can’t speak from my own experience, but I’m told today’s AI software is pretty good at spelling and grammar, and is a major improvement on spelling and grammar checkers that come with your word processor.

It may seem odd that I’d actually go so far as to recommend using AI when my coaching often focuses on the very same obstacles.

But it’s not, really.

I look at these functions as tools that level the playing field, which is the very definition of accommodations.

For me, using AI means I don’t use precious brain resources doing things I’m having trouble with. Taking a few things off my plate leaves my brain with enough juice to handle the rest of it, freeing it up to focus on the parts that are uniquely me: the kooky ideas that flake off my brain in the middle of the night, the loopy trains of thought they generate, the writing voice that’s mine alone – at least, I’d like to think AI would never be able to replicate these.

When a client can get the more mechanical things sorted out, it frees us up to spend coaching time dealing with actual content, which is my actual specialty: listening actively while you work through your ideas out loud, haring down weird avenues and finding your way back to what makes sense, generally figuring out what you need to say by talking yourself through your thought process.

I do things AI is highly unlikely to be capable of: interrupting you with questions pointing you towards your next thought, your next connection, or the next logical step, coming up with more questions to get you unstuck when you hit a dead end. This involves empathy and a sometimes-almost-spooking psychic connection that allows me to feel towards where you’re headed and help you get there.

I also help with the background noise, which I’m pretty sure AI wouldn’t do either. Things like the paralysis that sets in when a lifetime of microaggressions leave you questioning every word you write. Or feeling of banging your head against the wall or maybe swimming through a sea of molasses every time you sit down to write. Or when you need to pick yourself up off the floor and start again – again! – because you were sick or your kid was sick or you had to go away and now you’re back but you’re 3 weeks behind schedule and you’re in a blind panic.

In short, all those things that hoover up your time and energy and leave you feeling like you’ve been hard at work, and you know you’ve been trying as hard as you possibly can … but you’ve still got nothing.

Those are the times when you most need an actual coach.

And an AI bot, no matter how compassionate, is just no substitute.