Not long ago, in a bibliotherapy session, a woman I will call Anna arrived at my door seeking literature to help her with grieving the loss of her mother. She had been asking ChatGPT for book recommendations at two in the morning. It gave her a string of reading lists focused on grief, healing, and loss. But when she spoke about one slim grief memoir that had made her cry on the train, what mattered was the emotional connection and intimacy she felt with the author, and all the life history, context and consciousness that the author brought to the page, into the memoir – something that we as readers often feel is missing in the writing produced an AI tool such as ChatGPT or Claude AI.
As a bibliotherapist, peers and clients alike share their use of tools such as ChatGPT and Claude AI. They can help generate first drafts of novels, memoirs, book proposals, and even poetry. They can tighten sentences, adjust tone, summarise meetings, and even create images or visual concepts from plain-language prompts. Writers already describe using AI as a brainstorming partner, a first reader, and a kind of super-thesaurus. Used lightly, it can feel like a brisk studio assistant: never tired, never offended, always ready to offer another perspective, which for some writers can be a godsend.
While this is the promise of AI, I often hear from peers that while AI excels at optimising a piece of writing, it lacks the creative soul that brings in multitudes of human experience and emotion in the writing – the absence of emotional intelligence or lived experience or even human suffering, which is often the foundation of creative work for many writers. And not to forget the underlying generic tone of the writing produced: all writers start to sound the same: the same, generic middle-distance voice that can feel eerily perfect or smooth.
For me, the deeper question is not whether AI can produce a decent piece of writing, but what the writing is for. In bibliotherapy, language can be hugely meaningful for readers, and the choice of words, space, and grammar matter for this very reason. A sentence can hold hesitation, temperament, memory, and contradiction. The reader feels the pressure of another consciousness behind it.
AI can imitate the surface of an author’s work with eerie perfection, and people can become emotionally engaged with their work; however, we still seem to want a human somewhere in the loop, whose writing and human experience we want to connect with, beyond the words on the page. And I think that instinct is wise.
I will almost certainly go on using AI at the edges: to sift research, test a structure, unstick a title, perhaps even generate a visual moodboard for a talk or workshop. In the back of the mind, though, a deep-held belief surfaces: writing is not only the making of sentences; it is the slow discovery of what one believes, fears, or loves. We write to understand how we feel, to resolve an issue, to gain clarity, and simply to let our imagination run wild. And that is the power of writing that we must hold on to. In my world, books heal because one human mind meets another on the page, and the page still needs a pulse.
Bijal Shah is a bibliotherapist, counsellor, and author; founder of Book Therapy; and author of Bibliotherapy: The Healing Power of Reading.
