What to ask of an AI writing assistant
Before choosing an AI assistant for a novel, ask what it reads, who decides, and what it does with the parts you refuse.
Start with the book, not the features
Lists of features make writing tools look alike. Most of them can generate a paragraph, suggest a title or tidy a sentence. A novelist's needs are more particular than that: a long manuscript that already exists, a cast that has to stay consistent, a voice that took years to find. The useful question is not what a tool can produce from nothing, but how it behaves with the book you already have.
The questions below are the ones worth asking before you trust any assistant with a novel, including this one. None of them needs technical knowledge. Each can be answered by trying the tool for an afternoon, or by reading what its makers are willing to state plainly.
Does it work from the book you have?
An assistant that starts every conversation from nothing will give advice that could apply to any book. Ask whether it can work with your chapters, your characters and the world around them, and whether it remembers a conversation you had last week. A simple test is to ask about a minor character from an early chapter and see whether the answer is about your book or about books in general.
It also matters how the book is organised. A novel is not one long document; it has parts, chapters, people and places that refer to one another. A tool that understands that structure can bring the right chapter back into view when it matters. One that sees only the page in front of it will keep asking you to explain what the book already says.
Who decides what reaches the page?
This is the question that separates assistants most clearly. Some write straight into your text. Others offer a suggestion you must accept or reject as a whole. The more useful kind lets you keep part of a proposal and refuse the rest, because a revision is rarely all right or all wrong. Ask, too, whether anything ever happens without your answer, and whether the tool says so where you will see it.
Telleny's answer, for the record: a change to a chapter arrives on the story canvas as a proposal beside your own prose, and you decide it a span at a time. What you refuse does not reach the chapter. A section still pending after seven days is applied to the chapter, and the story canvas states that period beside the draft, so the rule is never a surprise.
What happens to what you refuse, and to what you write?
Refusing should be easy and final. A suggestion you turned down should not come back unasked, and saying no should not feel like failing a task. Watch how a tool behaves after the third or fourth refusal: whether it keeps pushing the same idea, or whether it takes the correction into account and moves with you.
Then ask what happens to your writing itself. Is it used to train anything? Is it sold or shared? Can you delete it, and does deleting it actually remove it? A trustworthy answer is short and specific, and it is written in the privacy policy, not only in a reassuring line on the home page.
What should it never claim?
Be wary of an assistant that hands a chapter a grade or a score, or sets your book against other people's. A score is a judgment wearing the clothes of a measurement, and a novel is not improved by passing a test. What a tool can honestly report are facts about the text: that a name changes spelling between chapters, or that two stated facts disagree. Be wary, too, of one that claims a share of authorship, or that measures its value in how quickly a book gets done. Speed is easy to count; it is not what makes a novel good.
A good assistant is modest about its role and clear about yours. It can examine, organise, draft and revise, and it says plainly that the book and every decision in it remain the writer's. Those are the terms Telleny is built on. AI in Telleny sets them out in full, and Notes from Telleny argues for them at more length.