Artificial Interference
It would be hypocritical of me to complain about AI encroaching on fiction writing when clearly AI image generation has been used to augment this website. But I think there is a nuance here that is worth talking about.
Firstly, I want to acknowledge the human cost. I regret the loss of anyone’s livelihood due to AI content generation, for I've felt the personal sting of technological displacement myself: as a bookseller watching automation, online retail, and supermarket dominance erode the marketshare of the traditional bookshop, and later as a videographer seeing robotic heads replace camera operators, then watching the ‘content creator' economy and 4K smartphones destabilise professional filmmaking. So I understand what it means to be pushed out by the new.
Where I draw a hard line, in terms of creativity, is in the utilisation of algorithms for direct monetary gain. I will not seek financial reward for something I have not personally created myself. And so I have not, and will not, use AI to generate story ideas, let alone have it write my prose for me.
That being said, I do treat AI as a tool—since mid-2025, as a tireless line editor. If a sentence feels clunky or the right word is stuck on the tip of my tongue, I might ask the AI for a synonym or a quick critique of what I have written, much as I would have dived for my thesaurus or shown a manuscript to a friend. It’s actually pretty helpful for pointing out things like excessive filtering or weak phrasing. But I never just copy-and-paste what it spits out—rarely if ever has it been that good. Instead, I use it to kickstart my own brain, helping me see an angle I might have missed. Think of it less like a co-author, and more like a brainstorming partner for revisions.
To be honest, while AI is okay at that surface-level editing, it’s terrible at the deep stuff. AI is great at writing text, but it is awful at understanding subtext. If you ask it to write a story, you’ll get something that mimics the shape of a narrative—plot-driven and functional—but it usually lacks soul, nuance, or layered meaning.
At least for now.
What actually keeps me up at night isn't the fear that AI will stop me from writing. It won't stop you, or anyone else with a passion for storytelling, either. My fear is that it will destroy the value of writing.
Imagine a world where anyone can generate a new novel each month and upload it instantly. If the online bookstores get swamped with a tsunami of AI-produced content (so-called AI-slop), then finding a genuine, human-written book, let alone a good one, will be like finding a needle in a haystack.
If that happens, the market crashes and writing becomes a passion project, with zero chance of any writer making a living. And if authors can't afford to write, then we all lose out., for we risk ending up with the literary equivalent of the modern Hollywood blockbuster: safe, lacklustre stories manufactured purely to grab market share, with no unique voice and no courage to challenge the status quo.
That is definitely not a creative world I want to live in.
