You may have heard that AI writing means the death of writing done by actual, live people. In a way that’s true, and in a way it isn’t. Let me explain.

Many—perhaps most—of the fiction books that you see for sale on Amazon and other outlets are AI-written and almost universally bad. Rotten, really. So bad that you want to throw them against the wall. (Unless you have a Kindle, Nook, or other e-reader, of course. Then you only want to delete them. But I digress.) They are too short, too filled with adjectives and adverbs, too lacking in a coherent plot, and too deficient in character development. Even the most potentially vivid genres are bland.

You may say to yourself, “I could write a better novel than this turnip.” And you very likely could. (So why don’t you?)

But AI has taken over most of the writing space. Even books that you yourself don’t write aren’t written by a human being. (I should know. I often freelance for a ghostwriting service that shall remain nameless because of the NDA I signed. They used to have lots of us human beings doing the writing. Now they largely have “writing packages” produced by AI. The only time a human being touches the book is to supervise the AI engine, which sometimes goes madly astray, and to “humanize” the results (it’s known in the trade as “polishing dogshit into gold”). But I digress again. At length.)

That’s the bad side of AI writing. What, I hear you ask, is the good side?

It can make you a better writer.

Hear me out.

Let’s think about the most basic AI writing tool that almost everyone is familiar with: Grammarly. Yes, it follows along behind you and corrects what you’ve written when you’re typing too fast (like “isfamiliar”). And it always changes your word choice to “ducking.” It’s never “ducking.” But, if you pay attention to it, Grammarly is a teaching tool.

Grammarly sends you reports that list your most common mistakes that week (or month, I don’t remember). If it says you have problems with subject-verb agreement, brush up on that. If you have trouble remembering whether commas introduce an independent clause or a dependent one, look it up and try to remember it the next time you write.

Teachers worry that their students will use AI to write their papers for them. (One of my friends now has her students write out their essays longhand, like I did in the Victorian era. But I digress some more.) They may indeed rely on AI. (A survey of students found that they considered it cheating, however.) But there are many AI detectors available to teachers that sniff out suspiciously smelly AI-created sentences and paragraphs and report on how much of a piece of writing seems to be human or AI.

This, of course, has led to ways to avoid the AI detectors. One I saw recently offered a series of prompts a student could give the AI program in order to produce a piece of writing that would appear to be human-written. The list of things the sneaky student should tell the AI program to avoid was comprehensive and long.

It told students to create a prompt that specified not only the topic and tone of the illicit paper, but also to avoid common signs of AI content that the AI checkers teachers use frequently will flag.

The list of things to tell the AI to avoid included: sentences more than 20 words long without one clear idea and paragraphs all the same length; passive voice; abstractions instead of concrete words; sentences of all one length; a lack of measurable facts; suspect punctuation (semi-colons and em dashes) (I disagree with this stricture. I love semi-colons and em dashes, as if you hadn’t noticed. But I digress yet again.); overused words and phrases (an extensive list, including last but not least, cutting-edge, delve, game changer, nonetheless, despite, moist, subsequently, furthermore, utilize, leverage (and any other biz-speak or tech jargon)); adverbs and adjectives; hedging; more than one prepositional phrase or verb phrase; all-caps or numbered lists; and metaphors involving landscapes, music, or journeys. (I once asked ChatGPT to write some poetry, and it really overdid those metaphors. But I digress even more.)

In other words, if you know what to tell the AI not to do, you already know for yourself what not to do—or keep that list handy and refer to it often—you’ll be able to write your own sparkling prose without Robby the Robot’s assistance. And the process of learning to tell the AI how to write undetectably will improve your own writing.

If you think of AI as a way to learn instead of a way to cheat, you’ll do well.