5 ways authors who like writing can use AI
A lot of writers hate the idea of using AI because they actually enjoy writing. Who wants to delegate their favorite hobby to the robots?
But in reality, writing isn’t only drafting. It’s research, marketing, editing, finding keywords, and so much more. And you don’t have to love all of it. You also don’t have to do all of it. You can delegate the tasks you don’t like to an AI.
Here are five things worth trying.
1. Research
Yes, AI hallucinates. It will invent a citations. That doesn’t make it useless for research — it means you don’t use it as an oracle.
Back when I was in high school, most teachers would say never to use Wikipedia. But smart teachers would say to use it, and look at the sources. Verify. Not just that the source exists, but also that it was written by someone you trust.
For story research, I recommand NotebookLM. (No, it’s not an affiliate link. None of the products mentioned here are, I just think they’re great tools.) You pick the sources yourself — the PDFs, the articles, the chapter of the history book you photographed at the library — and then you ask questions about those sources. Every answer points back to the passage it came from, so checking is one click instead of an afternoon. It will also go looking for documents and references on a topic and bring back a reading list.
Don’t take it at its word. Do use it when you have forty tabs open, you’re trying to work out what a Victorian lady’s maid actually did all day, and you need to know where to start.
2. Ads
AI-assisted ads aren’t just AI images. Or hooks.
The boring, time-consuming half of running ads is the platform itself — logging in, checking which campaigns are bleeding, pausing the bad ones, duplicating the good ones with a new audience, building the next batch. With Claude in Chrome, you can hand that over. It drives the ad platform in your browser the way you would: starting and stopping campaigns, creating new ads, reporting back on what it changed. You stay in charge of the budget and the strategy. It does the clicking.
For the creative, Claude Design will lay out an ad from images you provide — your cover, your own photos, a piece you commissioned — so the visual is yours and the layout work is done in minutes instead of a Canva evening.
3. Editing
This is the one we built. With Ghostkey, you can use AI to polish and edit your book — line by line, catching the POV slips and the loose phrasing without touching your voice.
Even if you plan to hire an editor, do this first. An editor’s time is expensive, and every hour they spend flagging repeated words and dangling modifiers is an hour they’re not spending on the things you can’t see yourself: the pacing sag in act two, the character whose motivation stopped making sense around chapter twelve. Give them the cleanest version you can produce, so they can focus on the complex problems you actually need them for.
4. Translation
Translation has come a long way since the days of Google Translate spitting out sentences that read like assembly instructions. Fiction was always the hardest case — voice, idiom, rhythm, the joke that only works in one language — and it’s where the models have improved most.
With AI Novel Translation you get a solid, readable manuscript in the target language at a fraction of the cost of a full human translation. It’s not the final draft. It’s the draft you hand to a native-speaking editor to refine, which is a far cheaper conversation than “translate this from scratch”. For a back catalogue that was never going to justify a professional translation, it turns “never” into “this year”.
5. Making your website
Every author needs a website, and most of them are either paying a monthly Wix bill for a page that changed twice last year, or wrangling WordPress plugins at midnight because the newsletter form broke again.
Lovable is the alternative: describe the site you want, and it builds it. Book pages, a newsletter signup, a bio, a link to your store. You edit by telling it what to change. The result loads fast, it’s structured the way search engines want, and when your new release comes out you add it in a sentence instead of a support ticket. Customising it is a conversation, not a theme file.
Notice what’s not on the list. Nobody’s drafting your chapters. Nobody’s inventing your characters. The pattern in all five is the same: AI takes the jobs that were keeping you from the desk, and gives you the desk back.
If the editing one caught your eye, Ghostkey is free to start — bring the manuscript you’ve already written and see what it finds.