In Which I Choose To Believe That The Human Writers Will Prevail.

There was a moment, this morning, when I was going to put on my armour, and suit up like a warrior queen, and die in all the ditches in the epic battle against artificial intelligence. My sympathetic nervous system, fully activated, rummaged through the full selection of Fs - fight, flight, freeze, flop, fawn - and chose Fight. With a capital F. I was very much like Elizabeth I at Tilbury.

The fight would, of course, take the form of a splendid essay. It would be filled with sardonic rage, and untrammelled passion, and something else which I have now forgotten. (Something magnificent, obviously.)

I wrote this trumpet blast in my head as I walked the dogs and did a bit of washing up and briefly contemplated the contents of the Cupboard of Doom, which had to be removed yesterday because there was an unexpected visit from the emergency plumber. (My boiler pump had - rather bathetically - broken. This was slightly less like Elizabeth I addressing her loyal troops.)

Anyway, I wrote the call to arms like billy-o in my head and I could imagine all the fellow writers on Substack rallying round and we would form a most excellent literary army and the dastardly computer overlords and blind tech brothers would have nothing on us. (Blind as in: blindly walking to their doom.) We writers would prevail, because we had Jane Austen and William Shakespeare and George Eliot on our side.

And then something faintly disconcerting happened. By the time I’d written the mighty thesis in my head, and metaphorically nailed it to the Wittenberg door, and made the vital cup of coffee which would get me to my desk and help me type with the wild bravery of an English archer at Agincourt, I had suddenly lost my thread. I couldn’t quite remember what I was so livid about in the first place. Which speech was I going to give, at Tilbury docks?

I have a very British part of me who hates drama and loathes fuss and thinks that things will quite often work out for the best. She is not at all related to my creative, writing self. But she sometimes comes in and shakes her head at us. (And possibly saves me from making a total idiot of myself.) She magically appeared and said something like - ‘Well, some people will use artificial intelligence to write books and essays and some of them will get away with it and some poor saps will fall for it and even pay money for it but there’s absolutely nothing you can do about any of that.’

She’s quite ruthless, my inner sensible stoical grown-up. She doesn’t have much time for my finer feelings. She reminded me that nobody gives a tuppenny toss whether I use artificial intelligence or not, but that if it makes me happy I can stick to my own guns. (I suspect she thinks they are quite small pop-guns.) She is so sensible, this inner voice, that she thinks I could use the advent of the artificial intelligence writers as a spur. Fame is not the spur; bogus computer-sentences are the spur. I could get my dander up and work brilliantly on my writing mind and not give up and damn well show the Silicone Valley billionaires, or the fraud-writers, or the tech brothers, or whatever it is they are called. (The young men who love the technology and all seem to get up at four in the morning and work on their muscles. They make me feel very great-aunt-ish.)

I know that artificial intelligence is causing great ruptures out in the wider world. I shouldn’t really joke about it, because I know of people who have lost their jobs because of it. But when it comes to the writers - and those are the ones I saw this morning, standing up, telling terror-stories about popular Substacks pretending to be written by humans when in fact they were generated entirely by machines - I think we might be all right.

The thing that cheered me the most is that someone said, ‘AI isn’t funny.’ I’ve never used it to do writing, so I know almost nothing of it, but the moment I read this I thought, ‘Of course it isn’t funny.’ It will always be like a polite, eager Briton trying to speak conversational French in the heart of Marseilles. All the nuances and cultural references and jokes will be lost. The writers might even benefit from this lack, because they can be more funny - defiantly, waving their flags. It may be that in ten years time human writers will be loved simply because they are not machines.

Maybe artificial intelligence writing will have certain successes. Apparently, there are newsletters here which are coining it in without a real person with a real heart and a real mind writing a word. That feels a bit cheap and fraudulent, but then there have always been actual writers who made money by formula. There have always been artists of every stripe who care nothing for magic or beauty or aesthetics, so maybe the artificial intelligence pap isn’t much different. The rest of us will simply have to rise, and someone might notice that. Who knows? There may even be a premium on a beautiful book painstakingly put together by a non-machine. These might become sought after like Aston Martins are, or glass blown in Murano, or blankets woven in Wales.

I don’t know. I was enraged, for a moment, as I often am when I contemplate artificial intelligence and the English language. Is the rage because of the shoddiness and the gimcrack of it? It’s not just the actual writing which is so often bad, it’s the stuff around the edges, the kind of AI that people have been using, wittingly or unwittingly, for years. I tell all my writers never to go near the grammar apps, because they are rotten and misleading and often flat-out wrong. I just now had to have a wrangle and a brangle with my computer’s inbuilt spellchecker because it wanted to change ‘bathetically’ to ‘pathetically’. I had a moment of resentful fury: how dare some stupid machine tell me what I meant to write? And then a moment of slightly smug satisfaction: AI can surely never take over the world if it can’t tell the difference between pathetic and bathetic.

Maybe it will take over the world. But it won’t write The Great Gatsby, any more than forty monkeys in a room with forty typewriters will come up with Hamlet. I choose to believe that the greats will always be with us - the dazzlers and the sparklers and the glimmerers and the gleamers; surprising and delighting the Dear Readers, taking us to the wilder shores, making us cry and laugh and think.

I may be entirely wrong. But I choose to believe.