These are the surfaces

On writing, deep terrain and AI

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These are the surfaces

On writing, deep terrain and AI

I became a writer because I wanted to engage in the act of writing. Some of my fellow writers do not agree. Just lately, there have been a wave of scandals, from the winner of the Commonwealth Prize (whose author photo may also be AI), to the Modern Love column in the New York Times, to the novel Shy Girl, all of which were apparently written with the aid of AI. Even a book about the effect of AI on our understanding of truth turns out to have used AI-generated quotes. As the old saying goes, you couldn’t make it up, except perhaps with the help of some nifty software that may well end up eating civilisation as we know it.

Writing is a hard thing to do well, but it still astonishes me that so many people have thrown in the towel so quickly. They all seem to have an excuse: they incorporated the changes suggested by a freelance editor, who must have used AI; they used AI to generate ideas and keep them on-topic; they have an ‘unusual writing process’ (which is presumably unusual because it does not involve any writing). You would think, to listen to them, that writing was a previously impossible endeavour - comparable to finding the cure for cancer - which is now, finally, possible due to this miraculous technology. Instead, these people were confronted with the things that have always made writing hard - motivation, inspiration, distraction, precision - and have simply chosen to make it easier on themselves.