My AI Use Statement

Here's the short version:

I use AI to help plan, test, and tidy my work. But NONE of the WRITING in my work is AI output dressed up as mine.

However, AI-generated and AI-assisted art appears in my books in the period between 2024 and 2026.

I have since concluded that using AI art as a final output is wrong, and have committed to no longer using it.

It’s fair to say I’ve got myself into a bit of an ethical mess, so it's only fair I show how I arrived here.

In the beginning…

My original Lightbulb Moments in Human History book was written before AI was a thing. It relied heavily on illustrations, and I cannot tell you how much money I spent licensing images from Adobe and other suppliers — or how many hours I spent hand-editing and Photoshopping them to look the way I wanted.

So when AI art arrived, becoming an early adopter was a no-brainer. If I wanted an image of Julius Caesar eating a pizza, it was mine to be had. A cheeky prompt, and voilà. Too easy.

I knew the ethical arguments. To my shame, I did not care.

Then I started seeing illustrations almost identical to mine cropping up all over the internet. My first reaction was outrage: how dare someone steal my AI art! But of course it wasn't my AI art — it was stolen from the work of masses of human artists who are neither acknowledged nor paid.

And I was a willing accomplice to the theft.

But even then, I didn't stop.

I extensively hand-edited AI-created images, telling myself that my ability with Procreate, Photoshop, and good old pen and paper made it honest: wasn't that exactly what I'd done with licensed stock? But the base art was still AI, still built on legions of unacknowledged artists. I was still cheating.

Eventually, the AI art that used to amaze me just annoyed me. It became the signal of lazy, low-energy book creation, and when Amazon became flooded with books made by AI with minimal human input, it stopped being an aid.

It was at that, some might say, belated point I concluded that certain types of AI use were wrong, and committed to no longer using AI-generated artwork in my work.

Then I made one more mistake: narrating the audiobook of Unearthed: A History Nerd Abroad in Europe with an AI clone of my own voice. Ethically I felt fine... it was MY voice, after all. What I didn't factor in was the anti-AI backlash that made the audiobook unsellable.

That was the final straw. AI output had become commercial poison.

So here's what I actually do now

I use AI the way I'd use a human editor, to pressure-test the logic of my (human-written) plots. Half its value is handing me clichés I can flip into genuinely new ideas.

I still occasionally use an AI to create guide images (of my own hand-drawn characters, in a style I developed myself) that I then totally redraw in Procreate. Initially, this may seem little different from my previous use, but importantly, the AI images are just disposable scaffolds that never appear in the finished product.

So, even though it takes many hours of painstaking work, I no longer use AI art for publication. (In fact, I'm steering my books away from needing illustrations at all.)

Everything that reaches the finished page is MY intellectual property.

And yes, AI still catches my spelling and grammar errors, and I wouldn't have it any other way.

What I won't do is let it write the final words, draw the final art, or pretend to speak in my voice.

As an experiment, I dropped a draft of this into ChatGPT, and without being asked, it rewrote the whole thing. It read well (more professional, even) because every quirk had been flattened and sanitized. It wasn't my voice anymore.

And that is exactly what we lose if we let AI become the final output of everything humans create.

One honest caveat: if you've arrived here from my website, some of what you'll find there is a veritable crime scene of AI use. A few images follow my new stance; others are leftovers from my early-adopter days.

My excuse? Realistically, there isn't one. I'll be replacing them in time. Until then, I am, indeed, a hypocrite.

But I'm no Luddite. I don't want to burn down the server farms, and I don't hate AI.

It just shouldn't be the end product.

Scott Edwin Williams