One of the most difficult parts of writing is “killing your darlings.” That might mean cutting out a part you liked to make the story as a whole better. Or, more generally, it can simply mean deleting the boring parts of your story. (As Elmore Leonard said, there should be no boring parts.) Perhaps one of the greatest upsides of writing with AI is that it can help eliminate the “sunk cost fallacy” that authors often face with the words they have already written.

If you spend hours upon hours writing something, even if it’s mediocre or downright bad, you are hesitant to discard it because you spent so much time writing it. From economics and psychology, we know that this line of thinking is a logical fallacy. Just because you spent time or money on something doesn’t mean you should stay committed forever, or until it turns a profit, because it may never do so. You may save more time and money in the future if you simply cut bait, take your losses, and move on.

Shifting the analogy from the world of investment back to the world of writing, this could mean throwing out thousands upon thousands of words that you spent hours upon hours writing and simply moving on to a new better idea. This is very difficult for writers to do because of the “sunk cost” feeling that you don’t want to delete all those words that you spent so much time writing. But with AI and a tool like ChatGPT, writers can more easily bypass this sunk cost pitfall.

With ChatGPT, the act of writing words itself becomes less valuable because writing is less time-intensive when you can instantly generate thousands of grammatically correct words. The inherent value of mere wordcount drops to zero. In one sense, the thought that words in themselves are worthless may seem haunting to a writer, but in another sense it is freeing. You can more easily throw out previous drafts, even if you spent a lot of time on them, because you can instantly generate a new draft with your better idea.

As I said before, the AI draft likely won’t be great. It will require re-writing and editing on your part to make it publishable. But having that rough draft to work with can be easier than staring at a blank page—especially when you already overcame the blank page to create a first draft, flawed as it may have been. Though AI is limited, ChatGPT’s mediocre draft based on your new idea might be better than your flawed draft based on your old idea. Then you can use your human creativity to turn that mediocre AI draft into a final draft that is good.

You can even use AI to help rewrite your previous draft with the new ideas incorporated. In the past, writers were more apt to continue rewriting a flawed draft, endlessly trying to turn it into something salvageable, whereas now it is easier to just throw it all away and use ChatGPT to generate a new draft. Either way will require effort and rewriting on the human’s part to make it good, but AI can help reduce the time and effort required.

In my previous posts about ChatGPT I was generally negative on AI’s potential for writing fiction, but I admitted there were some positive use cases and this is one: avoiding the sunk cost fallacy by using AI to kill your darlings and rewrite yourself. Again, ChatGPT works best in a collaborative effort, where the human writer uses AI with words they’ve already written. Always keep the author’s voice central to the creative process, then use AI as a tool to iterate and innovate upon that process. AI should be used in addition to human writing, not as a whole-cloth replacement of.