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Posted on 07/21/2026 3:12:44 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
This week I was replaced by AI. I saw it coming, but it didn’t make the news any easier to deal with. To be honest, it terrifies me for the future of our species. If that sounds a bit over the top, hear me out.
I am a writer. Not only that, I am a commercially successful one. Although you probably haven’t heard of me, I’ve published more than 300 short stories in women’s magazines over the past 15 years. From ghost stories in Woman’s Weekly to tales of romance in Take a Break Fiction Feast, I write them all. Sorry – wrote.
Dear Geoff,’ the email said. ‘Going forward, our in-house team will be using AI tools to compile future editions, but we thank you for your many contributions to the magazine over the years. Kind regards, Rebecca.’ Or to put it more bluntly: ‘We’ve replaced you with a robot.’
I enjoyed writing all my stories. Sure, they were not exactly high art. I never expected a call from the Pulitzer panel or an invitation from Radio 4 to discuss how I manage to express the human condition. But coming up with characters, throwing them into difficult situations and seeing how they coped, writing dialogue that felt real, inventing satisfying-yet-believable twists, was all fun to write and, I hope, fun to read.
So I began typing my reply to Rebecca. I hadn’t even finished the first sentence when the truth occurred to me: Rebecca doesn’t exist. If a women’s magazine no longer needs writers, why does it need an ‘in-house team’? A vision rose in my mind of someone arriving at an office in the morning, switching on a computer, then going home again while the computer produced a magazine.
But the end of my career didn’t surprise me, because three things told me this was coming. The first was when my dad died two years ago. There was no funeral – he didn’t want one – but some close family had a small get-together where we planted a tree in my mum’s garden. ‘Has anyone thought of any words we could say?’ my mum asked. No one had. So I thought it would be amusing to give ChatGPT a few prompts to write a poem. My dad would have appreciated that. Within a few seconds I was reading out ‘A West Ham Fan’, a poem filled with humour and pathos. It was good.
The second thing that happened was a song appearing in my YouTube feed. ‘Pocket of his Raincoat’ was sung by Paul McCartney with a simple acoustic guitar backing, a Beatles ballad with wonderfully esoteric lyrics and a haunting melody. I love the Beatles and here was a song up there with ‘Yesterday’ and ‘For No One’. Why had I never heard it before? Then I noticed the performer: the AI Beatles. I had discovered a new favourite Beatles track neither written nor performed by the Beatles themselves. I was listening to a machine.
And the third thing. A few months ago, as an experiment, I prompted ChatGPT to write me a story I could sell to a women’s magazine: ‘Make it 700 words long, a love story, humorous, with an unexpected and emotionally satisfying ending.’ As soon as I hit return on my computer the story immediately began scrolling out on my screen. That story – funny and as good as any I have ever written or read – has sat on my computer ever since, an unsubmitted harbinger of the end of human story-telling. The unavoidable consequence of ever-improving AI is nothing less than the end of all human creativity.
There is no way to stop it. What Beatles fan is going to resist listening to a new album from the Fab Four because it was written and recorded by an AI app? Who wouldn’t be curious about a new Shakespeare play or a tenth symphony by Beethoven? And if you think it won’t happen, a quick search online will show you it already is.
YouTube is full of new songs from dead artists, movie scenes from actors who have never worked together, speeches and jokes from deceased politicians they never made. There are even concerts where Elvis Presley and the Beatles perform together in packed stadiums, concerts that never happened in real life. You might say all this machine imagination simply isn’t as good as the real thing. I say, give it time.
Some artists and creative industry organisations have fought back against AI. What is interesting about this fight, however, is that mostly it’s been about compensation for artists whose work is being used to train AI programs. In other words, if you want to teach AI to write a song in the style of Ed Sheeran or produce a novel in the ‘voice’ of JK Rowling, the argument is not about if it should be done, but whether these artists and writers should be compensated and if so how much. What this fightback misses is the new talent, the undiscovered storytellers and songwriters who will never be published or recorded. And it misses something else, something more fundamental.
AI doesn’t just mean short story writers and wannabe popstars are losing their careers. The unavoidable consequence of ever-improving AI is nothing less than the end of all human creativity. Why? Because whether it’s a novel or a rock song, a portrait or a poem, who is going to spend the years of study and practice required to produce something that can be churned out by a computer in seconds?
Even if an artist doesn’t use AI, who is going to believe them? If an unknown author writes the next One Hundred Years of Solitude, how will we know AI didn’t help? A young singer-songwriter is hailed as the new Bob Dylan? Maybe he just selected the ‘Dylan’ option on the songwriting app. In a world where music, art and literature can be made by machine, everyone will assume it was made by machine.
There is a story about Chicago in the 1880s. Back then, experts predicted cities would be buried under horse manure because of the growing number of horse-drawn vehicles. The arrival of the car and other motorised transport made those predictions obsolete. This story comes to mind because a couple of years ago TV personality Monty Don wrote an article suggesting prized jobs in broadcasting and the arts should no longer be given to privately educated straight white men like him, and instead previously under-represented minorities should be prioritised.
I was angry and wrote to Monty Don to tell him why. My son is white and from a working class background. But he worked hard, put in thousands of hours of practice, and won a fully-paid music scholarship to a private school. ‘Why should my son be overlooked just because he is white?’ I asked Monty Don.
Monty Don never replied and now I realise it doesn’t matter. Just like Chicago in the 1880s, technology has provided an answer no one expected. Black or white, male or female, straight or gay, there will be no jobs left in the arts for anyone.
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Well, at least there’s always fanfic.
Arts career 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣
There’s your problem.
Well written and I cannot say I disagree. How about a counter argument?
Hate to be the one to break it to her (or do I?), but if an AI-generated story is as good as anything you ever wrote, then maybe that says less about AI than it does about you.
On the other hand, maybe the LLM that generated the fiction was drawing the body of work generated by the author and her compatriots in the world of fiction, in which case maybe it could be taken as a compliment.
Just sayin’...
Our daughter-in-law with a BA art degree makes a very decent living as a commercial graphics artist with her own company.
Your condescension says a lot more about you than it does her.
Start writing interesting, provocative Ai mysteries.
Reminds me of when I had a double major in college. Spanish and Archeology.
I just LOVED Spanish from an early age. Later, was introduced to and fascinated with Archeology.
Eventually dropped the Archeology as I learned you really cannot pay a mortgage, or any other bill, pursuing Archeology.
Before dropping Archeology, I did get to participate in a Central American Maya excavation, so it was not all for naught.
How about a ray of sunshine?
Elon Musk once said here’s what will happen once all this AI/robot stuff settles down.
Robots will be doing pretty much everything. Every human will be given $50,000 in today’s money, to buy the things the robots produce. Everyone will have lots of free time to do as he wishes.
Happy, happy everyone will be.
🤔
AI looks for the answer acceptable to the most people. Think of all the derivative crappy pop that dominated the late 90’s / Early 2000 airwaves. That was radio execs calculating as AI does to get the most listeners.
If your art consists of aggregating, imitating, or regurgitating the work of others, you are in trouble.
Pelosi: ObamaCare Helps Artists Avoid Hassle of Working
https://www.cato.org/blog/pelosi-obamacare-helps-artists-avoid-hassle-working
We’ll soon all be Eloi.
Well, I would have.
“Arts career 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣 There’s your problem.”
Do you think the same will not happen to many other careers? How funny will it be when almost all of your medical experience has gone AI? Do you think it’s bad now, where you can barely see a doctor, settling for PAs? Soon you will not even be seeing PAs, you will be seeing a chatbot. It will happen. How about lawyers? It will happen. Do you think any career is safe? Ditch digger? Easy to replace. Auto mechanic? Easy to automate on newer cars; it will be built into the manufacturing plan. What careers exactly do you think will not be affected?
You laughing at arts careers, as if you are immune, just shows how either dumb, or mean, you are.
AI can’t create it just copies ,like the Chinese
It’s not only art jobs... Tens of millions of people will be replaced by AI... Get used to it because it’s going to start happening at a very fast pace.
Here’s a suggestion... Learn how to use a hammer... Construction and trades jobs are going to be the future... Right now these trades are very good paying, and it’s hard to find a plumber or an electrician... As AI forces people towards these trades... Getting a plumber or an electrician will become much easier in future. Who knows... Stone masonry may even make a comeback.
I’m thinking of one way the creative person may react to the existential Black Cloud of AI’s overreach:
Perhaps there will be a greater call for live performances for playrights, in person seminars for writers/ in person studio sessions for anatomy study and Fine Art techniques those who enjoy it’s production. More in person guided experiences, even if only by ZOOM.
He is dead wrong...about some of us on the right. "Some" given what I've overheard/read.
The left? 'Nuff said.
But this Conservative avoids everything AI when I have the knowledge to do so.
The ultimate AI creation, Barack Hussein Obama II. Barack Obama: A Man Without a Country? | by Susan Daniels - Private Investigator: https://cdrkerchner.wordpress.com/2026/07/21/barack-obama-a-man-without-a-country-by-susan-daniels/ #DonaldTrump #JoeRogan #JesseWatters #ElonMusk #SteveBannon #DOJ #ToddBlanche #KashPatel #SCOTUS #Congress #AlexJones
How do we know AI didn’t write that article?
Hmmm...”learn to code” comes to mind, but AI took over that. How about “Learn to mine coal”? Nah, the greeniacs destroyed that. What’s left? Not much.
Mr. Musk predicts 100 million anthro-bots running inside five years (maybe even a billion, he says) and he just tore down his very first Tesla 3 factory and retooled it to build Optimus robots. So surgery and shoe shining are out of the question.
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