Should you let AI write your memoir? The honest version

I build an app that turns a conversation into a memoir, so you can guess which side of this I'm on. But if I only gave you the good parts, you'd be right not to trust me. So here's the fair version — where AI actually helps with a life story, and where it doesn't.

Where it falls short

It can sand off your voice. The thing that makes a memoir yours is the slightly-off way you talk. The phrase you overuse. The sentence that runs long because you got excited. Left alone, AI "cleans that up," and you come out sounding like everyone else who used the same tool. That's the real risk, and it isn't small.

It can quietly get things wrong. Ask a model to write up your story and it will sometimes fill a gap with a detail that sounds right and isn't. It didn't lie on purpose. It filled in. Which means a person still has to read it and say, no, the car was green, and my father never said that. A memoir with invented parts stops being a memoir.

It can feel cold. For some people, telling a machine about their mother is just wrong, and no clever feature fixes that. Fair enough.

There's the privacy of it too. You're handing your life to software. You should care who's on the other end and what they do with it. (We keep stories private and don't feed them to ad models — but you should demand that of anything you use, not just us.)

Where it earns its place

It kills the blank page. This is the whole game. Almost nobody skips writing a memoir because they've got nothing to say. They skip it because "write your life story" is a shapeless, intimidating job that stays on the someday list forever. Talking isn't intimidating. Take out the writing and the thing actually gets done.

People say far more than they'd ever write. Nobody types the tangent about the neighbor's dog in 1968. But they'll say it out loud. And the tangents are usually where the good stuff lives.

No skill required. You don't have to be a writer, or decide you're interesting enough first. You talk.

It's cheap next to the alternative. A human ghostwriter runs into the thousands and takes months. Wonderful if you can afford it. Most people can't.

How I'd actually think about it

Split the job in two. There's the writing — transcribing, organizing, shaping paragraphs. And there's the truth and the voice — what really happened, and how the person really sounds.

AI is good at the first part and should own it. Let it do the mechanical work nobody enjoys. Keep a human on the second part. Read it back. Fix the green car. Put the odd phrasing back in if the model ironed it flat. The goal was never a polished book. It was their real words, kept.

And if AI isn't for you, a voice memo on your phone counts too. The tool matters less than people think. The only real mistake is the one almost everyone makes, which is waiting for a better time to start.

— Jeff