AI, for writers, is a minefield. There’s the plagiarism, the ickiness that someone can so easily mimic our writing style, cadence and tone, the misuse of intellectual property rights, the risk of our jobs being replaced (for example, ITVx have hired a Head of Generative AI Innovation). AI-generated articles are being published at the rate of knots and many are going to lengths to engineer their search results to remove anything derived from AI.

I’ve tinkered a lot with AI, as I think we all have by now. The experience left me feeling amazed and equally horrified. In a few ticks of the clock you have a fully SEO-d blog post. Yet, there’s something so unsatisfying and emotionless in that—not to mention the risk that it’s actually someone else’s work I’d be putting my name to. I love writing, the whole process of it; the researching, moving words around, letting them flow and percolate, and the glow you get when you know you’ve crafted something compelling. Initial curiosity rubs away when you begin to recognise the losses. Loss of integrity, loss of a skill, loss of pride in your work.

Using AI eliminates all that juicy good stuff. It feels cold, mechanic and, despite what people may think, it’s fairly easily detectable as being AI-produced. Although, I think the spottability as something being derived from AI will get more and more difficult as time progresses.

Recently, I was chatting with an editor at a publishing house about the use of AI in the writing industry and I liked how they put it. “We use AI for functionality but not to replace creativity.”

That resonated because that’s where I’d landed too.

You see, I have no issue with asking ChatGPT to provide me with CSS needed to change something on my website or to create a tile coverage calculator for my husband’s business from scratch. Nor do I mind asking ChatGPT if there’s a more efficient way to use technology to automate a workflow process. Sometimes, when I’ve needed to write a formal email or letter, I’ve used AI as a diving board, to riff-off. When my spoons were low, I used AI to help me craft some informal replies to emails and it left an icky residue, I didn’t feel I’d afforded those people the care and compassion they deserved. Recently, I was wanting to increase my protein intake and asked for some beige-ADHD-friendly, nutritious, protein-rich meals and it came up with a meal plan that blew my socks off. Although as I write this it occurs to me that’s still replacing jobs of a website developer, nutritionist, and VA, and the intellectual property rights conundrum still applies. As someone who chooses self-serve checkouts over a human-served checkout so that people can keep their jobs, I don’t like that at all. See, it’s a minefield this AI malarkey.

Technology replacing the manual aspect of things isn’t new. Consider how quickly we’ve adapted to motor vehicles over horse and carriage, emails over snail mail, computers over typewriters, GPS over paper maps, washing machines over wringers and hand-washing, smartphones over telegrams, and so on. As someone who has ADHD, our Eufy RobotVacuum has helped me keep on top of housework. It’s been well-documented that AI has been a tool for good in helping people manage their ADHD. Reddit is crammed with threads about it.

There’s no doubt about it, this wave of AI is interesting and nuanced and difficult to keep up with. The tide is one that’s ever-evolving and I’ve no doubt that in a year’s time the landscape will be unrecognisably different to where we’re at right now. We’re an innovative species, innovating at an ever-escalating rate. It’s true that many inventions replace jobs. On the other hand, a report from Dell predicts that 85% of jobs that will exist in 2030 haven’t been invented yet.

When it comes to replacing my craft, though? That’s now a hard “no”. There’s no satisfaction to be gleaned from (at least, there isn’t for me) handing in or pressing publish or send on something you had no skin in. None. Just a sense of guilt, shame, and of going through the motions. With creativity, as with all things, if you don’t use it, you lose it. We know by now that AI makes mistakes and when it comes to my work, I can’t risk that for a biscuit and nor do I want to. The research part of writing is glorious, it’s where you lose yourself in a project, have all the wondrous information marinate in your mind before, armed with a pen or laptop, you make sense of it all and put it into your words, in your way, with your energy, your nuance, your humanity. The toil and trouble is what gives you a sense of achievement at the end of the day. The journey, as they say, is more important and transformative than the destination. I buy into that.