When the US Copyright Office affirmed that human creativity is the deciding factor in copyrightability, it did not hand writers a blanket permission. It identified a threshold and left each of us to determine whether we stood above it. The concept of de minimis, a contribution so incidental that it does not materially affect authorship or the character of the work, typically covers things like grammar assistance, research support, brainstorming, outlining, marketing copy, and chronology. Human creativity remains the central and deciding factor. That ruling gave many writers a measure of relief, but relief is not a standard. I needed a more solid framework for using AI in my processes. What follows is not a comprehensive map of every tool I use. It is my attempt to articulate how my use of AI fits within that standard and why I believe it does.
Character Beats are those discrete emotional, cognitive, and volitional shifts through which a character, and, therefore, the reader, experiences a scene and moves from one dramatic state to another. AI offered material, but I exercised authorship through selection, rejection, transformation, and final expression of every moment the characters experience.
Theme and Meaning are the conceptual and interpretive dimensions of a narrative; the recurring abstract concerns the story develops, and the significance those concerns take on through the work’s structure, style, and dramatic action. Themes are not inserted. They emerge from the choices made at every other level of the work. AI can identify thematic territory, name concerns other works in a genre have explored, or reflect back what a scene might be saying. What it cannot do is know what each story is about in the way my life experiences shape my voice, through the pressure of every structural decision already made, through a sense of what the work is moving toward and what it must finally mean.
Voice is the identifiable verbal presence through which a narrative is articulated. It emerges from patterned linguistic and stylistic choices and gives the impression of a particular consciousness, attitude, or sensibility governing the discourse. AI did not generate voice here, because voice cannot be generated. It can only be recognized by a writer who has spent enough time with their own instincts to know when something rings true and when it doesn’t. I know what my prose sounds like at the sentence level, at the paragraph level, in dialogue, in interiority, in description. When something came back from the model that didn’t carry that sound, I knew immediately, and I wrote until it did. The governing consciousness in this narrative is not a pattern.
Character and Plot Arcs describe the interrelation between external narrative events, ordered and connected so that actions generate consequences, tensions accumulate, and the story’s dramatic pressure produces change, resistance, recognition, or self-revelation in its characters over time. Arc unfolds across hundreds of pages and thousands of decisions, each one made in relationship to everything that came before it. No element of fiction is more dependent on authorial intention than arc, because arc is argument. It is the writer’s claim about what experience does to people, what they can survive, what breaks them, and what, if anything, redeems them. I decided which pressures to apply, when to relent, and when to push until something in a character finally gave way or finally held. The shape of every arc came from that sustained, accumulated judgment.
Prose Generation is where every other element of craft either succeeds or fails. A character beat that lives only in an outline is not yet fiction. A theme that hasn’t found its sentences doesn’t exist on the page. Voice, arc, meaning: none of it becomes a story until someone writes it. I considered what AI returned, questioned it, challenged it, and measured it against the story burning inside me. AI returned material I could think with. I questioned it, pushed against it, and held it up against what I knew the story required. Sometimes it illuminated something. Sometimes it confirmed what I already suspected. But consideration is not composition. When the time came to put sentences on the page, I wrote them. The diction, rhythm, emphasis, subtext, and pacing. The imagery, the dialogue, the way a scene opens, and the way it closes. The point-of-view filtering that determines what a reader knows and when they know it. Every choice at that level was mine, made in the act of writing, and answerable to nothing but the story.
AI generates prose. They’re built to do it that way. I considered what it gave me. And then I wrote.
Stories That Bring Technology To Life 