Can I use AI to write my memoir?

As is the case with so many other technological tools, AI may herald great advances but it may also create as many problems as it solves. And while most of us wish we could write faster and more efficiently than we do, using AI to write memoir can present some serious issues.

For one thing, the most important element of memoir writing—bar none—is voice.

Mary Karr, one of the greatest memoirists of our time, goes so far as to say that “memoir lives and dies 100% on voice.” One hundred percent.

What Karr means is that no matter how interesting the story might be, if the narrator’s voice isn’t authentic, readers won’t be drawn in, they won’t trust or develop a relationship with the writer, and the memoir won’t lift into their hearts. It will just read as a series of things that happened to someone with whom they don’t have a particular connection.

Voice brings the narrator to LIFE. It isn’t just an important element of memoir writing, it’s THE critical one. So handing your voice to AI to do even some of the writing for you hampers the potential of your memoir, but it also robs you of agency and creative satisfaction.  

Think of the difference between learning to play a particular piece of music on the piano and getting AI to make an audio file of someone like you playing that piece on the piano.

The whole point of learning to play music is actually learning to play music. It’s the richness, and challenge, of that experience. It’s the inner architecture that develops when we engage in creative endeavours. It’s the way our minds and hearts expand, the way we feel when we’re doing it, and the way that feeling changes us. It’s not a quick fix; it’s a slow, gradual, immensely gratifying and embodied experience. It is the wing-beat of creative energy that emerges as ideas open and revelations arise within us.

Being creative makes us feel more alive.

There is no doubt that AI can put a great many words onto a (virtual) page very quickly. It can organise and summarise (its meeting notes are far superior to the tedious old-fashioned “minutes,” for instance), and it can sound very convincing about everything, even things it gets completely wrong. (Notably, the people in my life who know the most about AI are the most wary of it.)

But it’s actually anti-creative.

What ‘Large Language Models’ (like ChatGPT and Claude) do is pull on the aggregate of information on the internet and produce the most likely response to a question or request based on everything that's been written before. Meaning that it is crafting the most predictable, least original, assembly of words available to it (while telling you how great and fascinating you are, just as it is telling millions of other people the same thing). It’s actually the furthest thing from creativity: it's predictive-model imitation. It’s what AI excels at.

The results might look impressive, in that it will produce a lot of words quickly {wow!}, and confidently {wow!}, and the document will look coherent and organised {wow!}. But, as with learning to play an instrument, the whole point of any creative endeavour is the process, not a hastily-produced product made by a machine. So you have a product, but you’ve skipped the part where you’re actually enriched by the experience.

Writing is a practice that sharpens and deepens our expressive and reflective capacities. Memoir writing involves the excavation and exploration of our lives and stories, and then the shaping, sculpting and recasting of those stories in fresh and ever-changing light. Far from being a series of events that happened to you, memoir is a broadening and deepening understanding of the meaning of those events—not to others, or to a machine, but to you and your irreplaceable heart.

Like anything profoundly valuable, this takes time and reflection, and often frustration and pain (which we would love to avoid or outsource), and it can be tempting to want to 'organise our way to the finish line as quickly as possible.' But in doing so, we risk missing another of the important gifts on offer.

Our stories have an uncanny way of changing as we write them. We think we know what the story is and what it means, but only when we are in the thick of it, sifting and examining it from a variety of angles and perspectives, does the ‘actual story’ begin to reveal itself. This can be as startling as it is illuminating, transformative in ways the writer couldn't have imagined at the outset, with insights that can alter the way the writer sees herself, others, and her life as a whole. Through writing our story, we often change our relationship to it, and its hold over us us. Quite literally, we become the authors of our lives.

Memoir writing can forge compassion and empathy, unexpected understandings and acceptance. It can foster forgiveness, of ourselves and others. It can mend hearts. It can weave us into the collective tapestry of humanity.

As far as I know, AI doesn't do any of those things. 

But maybe you just want to use AI to check your grammar and punctuation. (Grammarly is great for that, but don’t have it on as you write!!) Or you might think of using it to brainstorm ideas, edit or organise your thoughts or a scatter of documents and scenes. As with any tool (particularly a technological one), the key is to use it well, and not to be used (or abused) or disempowered by it.

Partway through the writing of this piece, when the first half felt pretty coherent but there were all kinds of raw ideas and partial sentences in a muddled heap at the end, I did an experiment. It was the frustrating part of writing, when you just want someone to swoop in and take over. I got up from my desk, put on some music and danced for a while. Then, when I would normally sit down and take that dance into the writing, I fed it all into AI instead, giving the instruction to take all my wandering thoughts and half-formed ideas and sentences and turn them into a coherent, satisfying completion to the essay, using my voice and style.

What came back was so bad, so pablum-trying-to-pass-as-pasta, that I tightened my instructions and told it to try again. To which it only produced more pablum.

“Ha!” I wrote. “You’re only proving my point.”

Here was its response:

You're right, I'm doing exactly what you're warning against — producing something smooth and organised that's lost all the life of the original.

The problem is that the raw material genuinely is a string of unfinished thoughts, abandoned sentences, and fragments. I can't sculpt it without making choices about what you actually meant to say — and those are your choices, not mine.

I couldn’t agree more. 

Discovering and crafting your personal story, in your own time and in your own true voice, using your own heart as your compass, has the potential to be one of the most empowering and enriching things you will ever do.

I would think twice about handing that over to AI.

Actually, I’d think a lot more times than that.

But ultimately, it’s your choice.

And your voice.

Alison Wearing is a bestselling, award-winning author, playwright, and performer. She is also a memoir writing coach and the creator/facilitator of Memoir Writing Ink, an online program that guides people through the process of transforming personal stories into memoir. Alison leads writing retreats internationally, and otherwise devotes herself to being a force of kindness, colour, and joy in this world. www.alisonwearing.com