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.
Can you code?
Exactly right. I remember when (ex-Uriah Heep) Ken Hensley’s last album, just B4 he passed away, came out. Very little on it was what I expected. Yet quite a bit of it was very good, despite major obstacles that trying to put it together during the Covid lockdowns generated. (I almost think that “overcome” effort and attitude is part of why the album came out well.)
“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.”
Aye, that’s the delicious rub, isn’t it? All of our writing, artistic work and engineering products are retraining the bots. We’re getting our just desserts.
Well, sooner or later either some opponent or the Sun is going to EMP us big time, and we’ll have to start over, sans computers and such...
Butlerian Jihad.
It could also be taken as plagiarism and possibly copyright infringement.
It’s a real threat, and not just in the arts. Why not replace college and professional sports with AI generated games and players? We could take injuries and bad calls out of the game, and every game could be a cliffhanger. The great players of the past could be given pixelized immortality on the holodeck. All races and genders could be fully and proportionally represented, and soon every viewer will be able to give a prompt and have a bespoke game and season conjured up in seconds.
What’s not to like?
All sports would become self referential daydreams, and I can be the hero every time.
Oh, goody.
When the concept is proven in sports, we can then apply it to politics....
Team Mamdani and Team Trump can exist blissfully sude by side because all the work will be done by machines and opposing factions will not even be aware of each other because everyone will be in a completely self referential virtual reality. Life will be an eternal conversation with oneself. Bliss.
Or maybe not.
Science fiction got there a long time ago.
But for anyone who steps out of the pods, there are awkward and challenging encounters with others. There is disagreement, conflixt, loss, pain, surprise, delight and joy in a world that is not predictable becauae it is not scripted. It is the encounter with The Other that drives everything.
And there is the problem of declining actuary numbers of US births and underfunded promised Soc Sec pensions and medicare.
Mike Rowe says we should all be plumbers.
Here’s what’s left for humans, apparently: sitting around, unpaid, telling each other it’s all over. But, if you aren’t on that bandwagon, you missed it. Already half of Twitter’s already doing that job full-time, for free, and doing it well.
Every essay declaring the death of human effort is itself a fresh instance of human effort, just aimed at the wrong target. Honestly, Geoff should’ve pitched his “I got replaced by AI” story to Woman’s Weekly. Guaranteed sale. Turns out that’s the one market no robot’s cracked yet, mostly because it’s the only one still standing.
I’m not laughing.
Can’t remember the exact wording but a civilization travels only as far as its creative artists ahead of it can see.
Full disclosure: Retired writer, wasn’t my primary occupation.
The SF novel The Silver Eggheads by Fritz Leiber satirized and foresaw the era of writing done by computers.
“...their fabled wordmills, two-story tall computers that output the omni-popular wordwooze, smooth bestselling writing ... thereby guaranteeing a steady inexhaustible need for new product. What the public doesn’t know is that writers merely dust the machines, who are programmed by publishers’ editorial directors.”
https://www.blackgate.com/2018/02/21/the-silver-eggheads-by-fritz-leiber/
> Why not replace college and professional sports with AI generated games and players? <
Now that’s an interesting concept. Every week AI videos get more realistic, it seems. There are sports videos on Facebook that I know are AI only because the participants do superhuman stuff, like jump too far.
Very soon a football fan will be watching an AI football game, and not realize it’s AI. The big question: will he care if the game is fun to watch?
And the millions of tech jobs taken by H1B visa holders? AI is nothing compared to the Indians. AI is an excuse for the Indians
I not convinced yet that AI can go on writing songs and stories and not repeat them or burn things down to the lowest common denominator. E interesting g to watch. I saw online a bunch of unsuccessful song writers loading their failed music into various AI programs and being absolutely thrilled with the result. As far as I could tell AI made the songs sound FAMILIAR, like everything on the pop charts. It was a little sad.
If everyone goes into trades who will make the tools and materials they use?
Learn to wire, and pour concrete and weld and build stuff.
“It could also be taken as plagiarism and possibly copyright infringement.“
I read somewhere that you can’t copyright a song AI comes up with. If a company prompted a new jingle it’s I. The public domain. Don’t know if true.
Millions of jobs were lost to the desktop pc.
Most of us were there for that. An automotive design studio had a large staff, drawing instruments, expensive desks, etc people worked in small shops to make that equipment and those supplies.
This has already happened. Anyone remember it?
RE: We’ll soon all be Eloi.
Yes. David Hogg and the males accompanying females to woke and feminist marches are in the lead.
Decades of having to apologize or step back to the advancement of women’s power, including the roles in TV comedies as well as thousands of TV ads have ruined the normal relationship of men and women to each other.
Subaru denigrating men.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=boSgMaMdcaY
And the “man” who is afraid of confronting change by shopping at Aldi. “Parking Lot Pep Talk.”
My clients aren’t even interested in AI. They have confidence in my abilities.
If you’re losing work to AI, it’s not AIs fault. No one really likes your work.
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