The line that stopped me came about halfway through my conversation with author Aaron Cully Drake: “AI is your mom, except without the guilt.” He was describing what happens when you feed a chapter into a well-configured AI writing tool and it flags the same structural problem — again, again, and again — until you actually do something about it. No softening. No letting it go. Just: this is still wrong, here’s why.
Aaron Cully Drake is a BC-based author and former newspaper reporter and editor whose debut novel was shortlisted for the Amazon.ca First Novel Award and longlisted for the Leacock Medal for Humour Writing. His second novel, When the World Was Twice as Big, is just out. When we sat down for the PULSE Community Podcast, I expected a conversation about craft and process. What I got was sharper than that — a real argument for why the writers who dismiss AI as a threat are misreading what it actually does.
His case, laid out plainly: AI cannot write your book. Use it that way and you’ll get garbage. But use it as an editor — one that holds your full plot summary, your character notes, and your theme document all at once and never forgets a single detail — and it becomes something a human editor can’t quite replicate. He described loading a chapter in with the full story context attached and asking simply, where am I going off-base? The AI, he says, catches patterns your own subconscious put there without your realizing. It points out the thread you were already following before you knew you were following it.
What I found most useful was his insistence on the distinction between the hard parts and the painful parts of writing. The hard part — getting up and writing every day — AI can’t fix. But the painful part, the one where you’re stuck on a chapter because you can’t bring yourself to cut a sentence you love, that’s where he says the tool earns its place. It will tell you to cut it. And then tell you again. And then tell you again.
Hear the full conversation with Aaron Cully Drake on The PULSE Community Podcast at: https://bit.ly/S2EP31PulsePodcast
Peter McCully is a multimedia creator and podcast host based in Parksville, BC. https://mccullymedia.ca/category/blog/