DEMON SEED – Part 1

Is using AI to help you write CHEATING?

Picture the scene - Mesopotamia, around three and a half thousand years ago, give or take. Two merchants are sitting by a river, one presses reeds into a patty of clay to form strange symbols on the surface.

What you doing there then?

I’m working out how much grain I sold today.

What – you mean you use Sumerian cuneiform?

Yeah – what’s wrong with that?

Just think you’re a bit of a wanker TBH. I’d never use a system to help me, I like to keep my work pure…

*

I’ve written seven books.

My first when I was 38. Before then, I couldn’t write. Or that was my belief. Certainly, my dyslexia meant I couldn’t spell. When I graduated from my therapy training part of the final presentation was a 50,000-word autobiography. I delayed it as long as I could, but ultimately it had to be done for me to qualify.

Last time I’d written anything was when I was 17, longhand with a fountain pen. Fifteen years later, tapping the essay out with two fingers I discovered this amazing, world changing technology:

Spellcheck.

When I was a kid, the concern, in the vernacular of the ‘70s, was that I was retarded. A psychologist was summoned. He asked me to write a simple sentence. Half-way through, I froze.

What he ascertained was not that I couldn’t write, but that I was an acute perfectionist who couldn’t spell. When I hit a word I didn’t know how to spell correctly, I would stop writing rather than risk making a mistake.

Spellcheck. Wow. It was like learning how to talk, the chains were off, I raced through the 50,000 words and when it was done I was hooked.

*

My first book started as an exploration, just to see if I could do it. Turns out I could, so much so I couldn’t stop. First draft was 2000 pages. I hired a coach, Tristine Rainer who wrote the wonderful Your Life as Story. She helped me hone it down to a readable 350 pages.

I asked around – now what? ‘Get an agent’, someone said, ‘it’ll take a long time but that’s where you need to start.’

I did some research and found an agent described in the Guardian as a ‘publishing colossus’. Sounded about right. I mean, I knew I didn’t have a hope, but start at the top and work down right?

He signed me immediately.

“I don’t mean to be weird,” I said at a fancy Notting Hill lunch. “But I’m surprised you signed me. Because… I can’t write.”

“That’s exactly why I signed you. You write like no one else I’ve ever read.”

*

The rest, unfortunately, is not history. I have the unpleasant status of being the first ever writer that he failed to sell. ‘Wonderful first novel’, they said. ‘Just no market for that kind of writing.’

So, back to being agentless again, I didn’t write again for almost ten years, effectively blacklisted. ‘If he can’t get you a deal,’ they said, ‘no one can.’

Fast forward twenty years.

Four books later.

I still have no agent. I still have no publisher. I write like some people go to the gym. It’s where I process. Free therapy.

And the last two, as yet unpublished books (Offensive, and The Other Place) I consider my best writing.

And you know why?

AI.

Yeah, and I’m not ashamed to admit it.

Nor am I reluctant to say a big FUCK YOU to all the literary snobs who dismiss people who use AI.

I remember you – the ones sitting at the front of the class.

But just like how Spellcheck opened the door, AI has given me an editorial overview that has unlocked so much that blocked me in the past.

I have a brace of learning difficulties. I write like I think – chaotic stream of consciousness. When I use Claude, (which seems marginally less evil than ChatGPT) I don’t ask it to write for me, that would be like asking a piece of software to eat a delicious meal for me or make love to my wife. I ask Claude – is this cohesive? Does it make sense? Am I repeating myself? Have I lost the reader?

And that… is a game changer.

Of course, you have to get through all the smoke it tries to blow up your ass, but as a tool, it’s as revolutionary to me as this keyboard that I still tap with two fingers.

*

I understand there are now software programs that can detect that I have utilised AI to help with my writing.

To which I say:

I DON’T GIVE A FUCK.

What are we? Back in school? Check me all you like. I’ve written five books without AI, two with. That those two are the best is no coincidence. Am I naïve, pumping all my precious prose into a bot? Of course – we are all naïve, no one knows where this is heading. Every day it seems I read a news piece about some bot going rogue, it’s only a matter of time until it’s ruling the planet, which would be HORRIBLE!!!

Unless you consider what a violent, fucked up job we’ve done of it.

But, like the first cave dweller who picked up a piece of charcoal and discovered you could make marks on the wall - I’m intrigued by the potential. And if a robot steals my work, so what? I don’t have an agent. I don’t have a publisher - knock yourself out, fuckin’ have it.

*

Is AI a bad thing, destined to sodomise us all with its evil robot sperm?

Probably.

To be frank, I think if I had the choice to turn off the internet right now, I’d most likely hit that delete button. And I bet you if I did, all those sanctimonious people calling out writers who use AI would be up in arms because they wouldn’t be able to use Google anymore to help research their historical novel…

If you use AI to write a book and claim that you did it all by yourself, you got to live with that. But if you use technology to broaden your artistic potential, is that cheating? Is it fake?

Man, I’m just a hairless ape, scratching a wall with a bone.

Having a good time.

Judge me all you like.

*

And so concludes part 1.

Part 2 will be posted on Sunday to coincide with the release of an episode of The Mind Forest Podcast where I discuss AI amongst other dangerous, contentious, monstrous, renegade, world threatening things.