writing

I joined a self-publishing Facebook group looking for advice on selling books.

Instead, I stumbled into one of the internet’s newest culture wars.

My crime?

Mentioning that I used ChatGPT as part of my writing process.

Within minutes, complete strangers had reached a verdict. Some declared that AI-assisted books were automatically garbage. Others insisted that using ChatGPT meant I hadn’t really written anything at all. One even called AI users “scammers.”

The interesting part wasn’t the criticism.

It was that nobody asked a single question about the books themselves.

Nobody asked about the plot.

Nobody asked about the characters.

Nobody asked whether the story was entertaining.

The judgment arrived long before the evidence.

And that’s what made the experience so fascinating—not as a lesson about publishing, but as a lesson about human nature.