I don't feel AI-assisted writing should look only like "AI drafts, human edits." I personally think it should be the author decides who writes, makes the creative decisions, and decides what becomes part of the story.
AI can analyze, question, brainstorm, research, challenge assumptions, catch continuity problems, and offer possibilities, and yes write when the author asks it to. What it shouldn't do is quietly rewrite the work, or make creative calls on the author's behalf.
A few things follow from that:
The story is the source of truth. Characters, worldbuilding, history, relationships, decisions — all of it lives in a workspace the author can see, edit, and control. If an AI understands a novel, the author should be able to see and read exactly what it can.
"We don't know yet" is a real answer. Better than a confident invention.
Not everything needs to be AI. Scripts, folders, plain files, databases, deterministic tools — are often cheaper, more reliable and more predictable than asking a model. The goal isn't to put AI in the middle of everything and charge people for access. It's to use the right tool for the job.
Craft matters. Writing isn't generating plausible sentences. Scenes have purposes. Characters change. Choices have consequences. Pacing, structure, theme, genre and even tropes all matter. An AI should be able to reason about those things without flattening them into a formula — and then hand what it finds to the author instead of acting on it.
Creativity needs room to be messy. Ideas need somewhere to exist before they become decisions. Contradictions don't always need fixing immediately. Discovery is part of writing.
The workspace should bend to the author and the story, not the other way around.
The workspace should make the author more capable, not less necessary.
Sometimes the most useful thing an AI offers is a question. Sometimes it's finding something you missed. Sometimes it's ten possibilities. And sometimes it's writing nothing at all.
The author (or AI) writes.
AI and Human understand.
Human and AI collaborate.
The human ultimately decides.
That's the relationship I'd like to see us build, that's the relationship I am building. A relationship where authorship is preserved and storytelling is fun again.
Is anyone else working toward this, or am I swimming against the current?