Godschild, who penned the fantasy novel The Hunter and The Hunted, says she’s been writing since childhood and goes through a lengthy process—plotting her manuscript years before putting pen to paper. A few days after seeing Aveyard’s 1,000-page edit post, Godschild posted a time-lapse of herself writing at her computer, captioning the video, “Watch this time-lapse of me writing a scene in a murder mystery TV show without the use of gen-AI.” The caption also notes that she’s “not a thief” and that “the murderer is so unpredictable not even a machine could figure out who it is.”
Some writers are using the AI controversy to remind people of the very human skills it takes to craft a complex story.
YA indie author Rachel Menard posted a TikTok of herself opening drafts of one of her manuscripts, writing that if she was using AI, “It wouldn’t take me 78 drafts to get it done.”
“Everyone has forgotten what makes a book good, and it’s the work that goes into it,” says Menard, who has penned three books independently. She adds that while AI may be able to “pop out a decent spice scene,” it can’t create a compelling story. “If my characters don’t feel like real people, living real lives, with real problems, then I need to keep working on it.”
Quan Millz, an indie author with over 830,000 TikTok followers and well-known for his jaw-dropping “street lit” titles like Old Thot Next Door and This Hoe Got Roaches in Her Crib, says accusations that he has used AI to write go beyond labeling him as a thief—they underestimate the cultural fluency behind his novels. Prior to revealing his identity on TikTok in 2023, Millz, who is Black, dealt with accusations that he was white and even a rumor that he was a “CIA operative.”
“It’s clear now that you use AI to write all your books. Ain’t no way you’re dropping the books this fast,” one commenter wrote on one of Millz’s posts.
Millz uses AI to make book covers, including for books that are still in the conceptual phase, but says allegations that he also writes with the tool are false.
“There’s no way in hell you’re going to get any of these AI models to really capture the essence of just how Black people talk,” Millz tells WIRED. The author says he has tested using AI for writing and found that the large language models censored his adult scenes and could not reproduce his nuanced tone. “It doesn’t understand that AAVE [African American Vernacular English] is not monolithic … Black people in Chicago don’t sound like Black people in New York.”
While Millz has hosted a couple of TikTok Lives documenting his writing process in real time, he tells WIRED that he won’t be hosting more—even if it helps prove to skeptics that his written work is original.
Constantly checking in with commenters hindered his writing process, he says, and he feels that while having a social presence is crucial in indie publishing, filming your process won’t provide more proof of AI-free work than your work itself—at least not yet. “I really do think that there’s something else transcendent about the human experience, something mystical that we just don’t know about yet, and you can feel that through the arts,” Millz says. “When you read AI text, even if you do a good job of trying to edit it or make it your own, there’s still something amiss.”
