Can AI Help You Write Your Memoir?

This is a question I am being asked A LOT these days, especially since disqualifying our first story from the International Amy MacRae Award for Memoir for being AI-generated.

Here is my current answer:

AI is being heralded as the answer to all our problems, including our literary ones—Write your book in 6 weeks with AI!—but as is the case with so many other technological tools, AI may actually create more knots than it untangles. While most of us wish we could write faster and more efficiently than we do, using AI to write your memoir can present some serious, even perilous, issues.

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

The great writer Mary Karr 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 strong and authentic—if we don’t hear it in our minds, ringing true as we read (grab any page from a Mary Karr book and you’ll see what I mean)—readers won’t be drawn in. We won’t trust or develop a relationship with the writer, and the story won’t lift into our hearts. It won’t matter to us. It will just read as a series of things that happened to someone we don’t really know or feel connected to.

Voice is what brings the narrator to LIFE. It isn’t just an important element of memoir writing, it’s THE critical one. And it’s easier to find than you might think.

You find your voice when you stop looking, stop pretending, stop trying to sound smarter or more eloquent or more evolved or more anything than you truly, humbly are. The voice of your memoir is your authentically imperfect self, the way you would tell a story to your best friend while sitting together on the couch in your slightly rank pyjamas, laughing or crying so hard that you’re wiping snot on your sleeve, knowing that she loves you too much to care.

Voice is what reassures us that you’re being real with us. It’s what makes us trust you enough to read on.

So using AI can siphon the power from your memoir, but it also robs you of agency and creative fulfillment.

I liken it to 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.

It’s ridiculous, of course, because the whole point of learning to play a piece of music is actually learning to play that piece of music. It’s the richness and challenge of that experience. It’s the inner architecture that develops when we engage in a creative act. It’s the way our minds and hearts expand, the way we feel when we’re doing it, and the way that feeling changes and enhances who we are.

It’s also about the growth we achieve when we stick with it, even when it’s difficult. And it’s that transcendent release, when time evaporates and the music begins to flow through us and become part of who we are. It’s the furthest thing from a quick fix, in other words; it’s a slow, gradual, gratifying and embodied experience. It is the internal wing-beat of creative energy that emerges as ideas open and revelations arise.

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.) Sometimes, AI can even appear to have a creative insight.

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 (almost) everything that’s been written before (including copyrighted literature that it trained on illegally). It’s vastly complex predictive-model regurgitation. That is what AI excels at.

The results 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, in my experience, beneath the surface gleam often lie shallow-shiny ideas, predictable rhythms, and a weirdly hollow voice.

Even more importantly, though, as with learning to play an instrument, the whole point of any creative endeavour is actually the inner process, the act and art of creating, not a hastily-produced product made by a machine. So while you might have a piece of writing, you’ve skipped right over the part where you’re enriched by the experience of creating it.

Writing is a practice that sharpens and deepens our expressive and reflective capacities. Memoir writing specifically 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, reflection, and often frustration and pain (which we would love to avoid or outsource), and it can be tempting to want to reach for something that will get us 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, facing the complexity of our knotted human lives, pulling and examining the writing from a variety of angles and perspectives, does the ‘actual story’ begin to unspool itself.

It is a mysterious process, and it 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 stories, we often change our relationship to them and their hold over us.

Not unlike what happens when we embody music, writing our stories can awaken in us a swirl of intuition and awareness, a sensitivity to nuance, and a perspicacity that can help us to become better authors, not just of our past stories, but of our present and future lives.

When it’s done well, this work can forge compassion and empathy, spawn unexpected understandings and acceptance. It can foster forgiveness, of ourselves and others. It can mend hearts. It can connect us as human beings, weaving 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, or to organise your thoughts or a scatter of documents and scenes. AI is terrific at organising and summarising, and highly proficient at filling a page with things that weren’t there moments earlier. But as with any tool (particularly a technological one), the key is to use it well, and not to be used 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 annoying part of writing, the chaotic stage, 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 dreadful, 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 rewarding 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.