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.
You won’t need those bimbo sideline reporters anymore saying, “I spoke with Coach X at halftime, and he said they have to play better in the second half.”
“Well written and I cannot say I disagree. How about a counter argument?”
How do we know whether it was written by AI?
I remember when the new Dodge Challenger came out there was an interview with the designer. He said they had to turn off the software because it wouldn’t allow them to obtain the look they wanted.
“Learn how to use a hammer..”
Better learn how to use a nail gun.
You can already get a scholarship for being on the videogaming team. As videogames, AI and virtual reality get better they may take over actual sports. I wonder, though. Athletes can license their images and records to game makers, but if they aren’t also playing against each other in real-life how will we know how good they are? And if it’s entirely made-up characters who compete in the virtual games, isn’t something lost? Michael Jordan or Tom Brady has something that an entirely fictional character doesn’t.
In the early 70s when I still watched baseball the network (NBC I think) had computer match-ups of the great teams in history. So it was the 27 Yankees, the 61 Yankees and other teams playing each other in a bracket set-up. I don’t know how “real” any of that was. Computer science was relatively new. But forever playing off the 31 A’s and 34 Cardinals and 55 Dodgers would probably get boring pretty soon, especially if the game weren’t being played in real life.
The AI generated bimbos will be better looking as well.
My daughter is a book editor, including proofreading a multi- million seller.
She can’t find any editing jobs due to the ai scourge.
My daughter is a book editor, including proofreading a multi- million seller.
She can’t find any editing jobs due to the ai scourge.
My daughter is a book editor, including proofreading a multi- million seller.
She can’t find any editing jobs due to the ai scourge.
What are you talking about?
I mentioned that sci fi got there a long time ago. In movies, The Matrix is probably still the iconic example.
This year’s outstanding example is Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die. Those who haven’t seen it should. It’s wild, surrealistic, and an action comedy, sci fi, horror mashup, but on AI, it’s on the nose.
Gore Verbinski, the director, emphasizes in interviews that AI is here, can’t be stopped, and will be a great tool for returning to the moon and curing cancer.
But it’s also coming for art, music, literature, and all the things that make us more than spectators and drones. That’s the problem. We all remember, I think, therefore I am,” An increasing number if people are outsourcing not only their reading, research and writing to AI; they’re outsourcing their thinking as well.
Changing gears, it’s also the most religiously coded movie I’ve seen in years — and NONE of the reviewers are picking up on that, even though it’s about as subtle as a 2x4 upside the head once it’s seen. It can’t have been accidental, but we’re in the midst of a pagan revival and the subtext has flown right over the head of The Modern Audience.
You ask a great question.
What could possibly go wrong?
Hmmm, that could be messy.
But broke unemployed Eloi. Will that make us all reeeally good-looking tanned long-haired blondes?
“Given”? Instead of lowering labor costs for companies? YOU can be the one waiting for that to happen.
Published in 1909!
Regards,
All current supposed AI isn’t AI just fast search engines with bias programmed in that can easily be proven wrong and makes many mistakes apologizing often.
When real AI becomes sentient, jobs will be the least of your worries. Fool.
“When real AI becomes sentient, jobs will be the least of your worries. Fool.”
LOL, the only reason I am foolish here is for continuing this discussion with you. But anyway... Nobody is talking about sentient AI. This is either a red herring on your part or you don’t know what you are talking about. What is taking jobs right now is chat style LLMs and various add ons, which can be configured to do a very large and ever-growing number of tasks. Your medical PA is already using it. It won’t be long before the middle-man PA is cut out of the picture entirely, and your “doctor” will then be something like chatgpt, even with all its mistakes.
So, go ahead and laugh at the arts jobs folks, you will suffer right along with them.
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