A robot stole my writing

So, how are you feeling about the whole, “Artificial Intelligence is about to take over the world,” thing? 

Does it bother you? Or are you more, ‘Robot, schmobot, I’ve got more important things to worry about?’ Or are you sticking your fingers in your ears, singing, ‘La la la’ really loudly so you won’t have to hear about how the end of the world as we know it is nigh.

Until this week, I was in the latter camp, hoping that if I just ignored AI and refused to read or talk about it, or go on Chat ABCDGPT or whatever it’s called, it might disappear.

But then the other day I was scrolling through Facebook and I saw a panic-stricken post from an author saying that she’d just discovered a website had used AI to scan her book and turn her writing into a formula that other aspiring writers could copy - or as the website laughingly called it: ‘Make your writing more vivid by mindfully comparing your prose with authors you admire.’

‘Mindfully comparing’ … or deliberately stealing?!

I have artist and designer friends who are already feeling the detrimental impact of AI on their careers so I knew it was only a matter of time before it came for the writers, and it seemed that that time had arrived. It was time to stop singing ‘la la la’ and take my fingers from my ears.

I clicked on the link to the website, where it told me to search for my favourite author so that I might be able to ‘mindfully’ copy them.

I entered my name … and up came my latest World War 2 novel, along with a graph showing the emotional peaks and troughs of the plot, and two scenes from the book, which had been broken down into some kind of colour-coded formula that people could copy in order to write just like me. Or in a ‘mindful’ tribute to me, or whatever.

My poor plagiarised book

As I looked at the graph and the codes, and my plagiarised text compressed down into a formula I had a flashback to my 20-something self sitting at my dining room table trying to teach myself how to write my first novel night after night while my baby son slept.

I didn’t have a writing degree. I didn’t have the money for any kind of writing course. I was a former council estate kid with a passion for storytelling that wouldn’t go away, no matter how much my inner voice of doom told me I didn’t have what it took to be a writer.

I sat at that table for hours and hours, night after night, week after week, month after month, sometimes crying tears of frustration and exhaustion, as I laboured over my first novel, figuring out how to develop well rounded characters and a page-turning plot. 

Eventually, something magical happened. My confidence began to grow and my ideas began to flow. I developed a unique voice and a rhythm all of my own. And it felt so frickin’ sweet to be rewarded for my grit and graft and determination and refusal to give up.

And even sweeter when I finally finished the first draft of the novel and was rewarded with my first book deal.

As I sat staring at my laptop this week, over twenty years and almost 50 books later, at my unique rhythm and voice being churned through an AI program so that some f***er can skip all the hard graft to leech off mine I felt so angry. And so sad for future generations, that they might be denied all of the challenge and the joy of honing a creative craft, and being rewarded for their time and efforts, because all of the books will be ‘written’ by a bunch of cheats and robots.

How is this progress?

Once, when I was a kid, our teacher asked us to write about what we thought the world would look like in the future. Just about everyone predicted that we would all have robots in our homes to do the boring jobs, like the cleaning and ironing. (I also thought we’d be travelling everywhere by jetpack and I’m still gutted this hasn’t happened yet.)

But now the robots are here - and instead of doing the cleaning they’re creating the art and writing music and books and screenplays, as well as threatening numerous other careers.

Isn’t there something very wrong with this picture?

Anyway, back to my story of the ‘mindful’ plaigiarising website. By the end of the day word had spread like wildfire on Twitter, or X as it’s now known, in another example of fun and creativity descending into bland mediocrity, and the owner of the book stealing website had been outed and piled upon by many of the authors whose work he’d stolen.

Oh the irony of this tweet from the story thief!

I woke the next morning to see that he’d taken his site down and issued a lame ass apology. A victory for people power, but for how long? This is just the tip of the AI iceberg and I feel like it’s soon going to be impossible to police. 

Like so many other people in so many different industries I’m now living with the very real fear that in just a couple of years AI will have taken away my livelihood.

Later that same day a man from a local charity called round to my flat. I’m leaving the UK to go travelling in less than a month and I’m donating almost all of my worldly goods to charity. The man had come to see how much I wanted him to take.

‘I want you to take everything, apart from that suitcase,’ I told him, and it felt so frickin’ good to say those words.

I’m fast learning that there’s such sweetness and freedom in letting go of just about everything. And as I revelled in that feeling, I thought of the whole AI fiasco and I decided to let go of that too. 

AI might end up taking away my earnings as a writer but hopefully I can make a living doing other things. One thing - the most important thing - it will never be able to take away is the joy that I get from writing.

I know without a shadow of a doubt that I’m going to write stories for the rest of my days, whether or not I get paid for them. And if other people want to cheat and take shortcuts just so they can pretend they wrote a book, good luck to them and their hollow dreams.

When I told my son what had happened there was a beat of silence before he said, ‘Mum, I have a confession to make. Every time I write a social media post for work I ask Chat GPT to write it in the style of Siobhan Curham. The only trouble is, it keeps mentioning Hitler and World War 2.’

As I fell about  laughing I felt myself letting go even more. 

And now, over to you…

How do you feel about AI? Do you see it as a threat? Or do you think it will be a positive thing for the world? I’d love to know, so feel free to reply or post in the comments.

Siobhan