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.
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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.
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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 the prose for me.
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That being said, I do treat AI as a tool—mostly 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.
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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.
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At least for now.
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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.
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Imagine a world where anyone can generate a new novel every month and upload it instantly. If the online bookstores get swamped with a tsunami of AI-produced content, finding a genuine, human-written book, let alone a good one, will be like finding a needle in a haystack.​
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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.
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That is definitely not a creative world I want to live in.
