People keep hurling accusations of AI-assisted writing as though it’s the new literary scarlet letter. Apparently, if a sentence lands too cleanly or an argument isn’t held together with chewing gum and vibes, someone’s bound to whisper that silicon fingers were involved. It’s all very witch-trial chic.
Video: My minion scribing this blog post. I want to teach it how to use a typewriter.
I’ve written about this on Philosophics. Not the tired panic about ‘machines stealing our jobs’, nor the hand-wringing about entry-level writers having their ladders kicked away. That’s a separate tragedy. My post digs into the moral melodrama over authorship itself, where a whiff of algorithmic contribution is treated like doping at the Olympics. As if writing were a pole-vault and not, you know, communication.
The whole spectacle reveals more about our Enlightenment hang-ups than about the technology. We still cling to this myth that pure, unadulterated human genius trickles from the fingertips of a lone, caffeinated scribe. Anything less than “authenticity” gets branded synthetic, corrupt, impure. It’s the same script modernism’s been peddling forever, only now the villain has LEDs.
Anyway, if you’ve got the stomach for a short polemic on why these accusations miss the point entirely, here it is:
I’ve finally given Propensity a trailer. This short piece captures the first of the novel’s three movements – the ‘scientific’ phase, when everything still believes it’s under control. Except for this cover image, I used no AI. Except for the book covers, all assets – video clips and soundtrack – came from Motion Array
There may be another to follow, drawn from the second section, where control begins to crack. For now, consider this a visual prelude: thirty-two seconds of atmosphere, code, and quiet collapse.
Propensity is available in print and eBook in the usual places – online or at your local bookseller.
I was musing on this topic – on writing, why one does it, for whom, and whether the effort deserves a standing ovation or a polite cough – when the Algorithmic Gods of YouTube, in their infinite surveillance, dropped this into my lap:
Video: Write like no one will read it.
What serendipity. Or surveillance. Or both.
Let’s be clear: I have no commercial aspirations. I write. That’s the thing. Do I want you to buy my books? Of course. But if you do, I’ll treat it like a solar eclipse – rare, beautiful, and probably not good for your eyesight. A bonus, not the baseline.
I’m not interested in moralising about art for art’s sake or parading around the notion of integrity like a damp flag in a digital hurricane. When I write, I write to express. Not to impress. I don’t care if no one likes it – though I admit, it’s a treat when someone does. Like finding your exact brand of misanthropy mirrored in another human being. Intoxicating.
I was in the Entertainment Industry for years. Not the TikTok variety – actual music, instruments, stages. The word sellout was thrown around like loose change. Some wore it like a scarlet letter, others like a badge of honour.
I remember Elliot Easton of The Cars once said to me – rather sheepishly, as if confessing to tax evasion – “I can’t help it that we’re talented.” This, after Heartbeat City blew up. He was defensive about success, as if it somehow invalidated his artistic credibility. Imagine being so good at your craft that you feel guilty for it. The poor bastard.
Elliot was a musician’s musician. He lived and breathed the stuff, but he wasn’t the band’s oracle. That mantle fell to Benjamin Orr and Ric Ocasek. Elliot was a brilliant contributor – but always downstream of someone else’s vision. I think his dissonance came from chasing a dream that wasn’t quite his.
I once saw an interview with Metallica. Their whole youthful drive was to be the number one band in their genre. They got there. Cue existential crisis. Now what? It’s the inevitable hangover of the goal-oriented artist. Beware the summit: it’s often just a ledge with a better view of the void.
Me? My goal is to write.
That’s it. Not to be a writer. Not to write a bestseller. Just to write. The thoughts in my head spiral out in all directions – sometimes absurd, sometimes barbed, occasionally beautiful. I’d love to share them with the world. And sometimes, gloriously, someone connects. A person I’ve never met reads a line and feels seen. That, my friend, is magic. Not transactional. Transcendental.
But if I were writing for them instead of for me? That would be an ouroboros – a serpent gnawing on its own tail, mistaking the feedback loop for intimacy. That’s not connexion. That’s algorithmic co-dependence.
Image: Technological Ouroboros – Autonomous Power Strip, because even metaphors get short-circuited these days
I’ll be honest: many of my ideas are weird. Not zany TikTok quirky. I mean alienating. Like stow-your-popcorn-and-strap-in strange. When I share them too early, I get a flood of feedback from people who were never going to be my audience. And yet they feel compelled to fix it. To shape it into something more palatable. More genre. More normal.
I’ve had entire manuscripts derailed by the well-meaning notes of people who should have never been allowed near them. Not bad people – just wrong readers. That’s on me. Lesson learned.
So now? I write like no one will read it.
Because they probably won’t.
And that’s oddly freeing.
Dance like no one’s watching. Write like you’ve been ghosted by the market. Make art like it’s the only way left to breathe. If someone finds it, and it saves their life – or just their afternoon that’s a bonus.
👽 People ask me: What’s with the aliens on the front cover of Sustenance? Fair enough. Let’s talk about it.
Sustenance is set in Iowa – real, dusty, soybean-and-corn Iowa. I’ve spent months there. I’ve lived in the Midwest (including Chicago) for over a decade. The farms, the tractors, the gravel roads… they aren’t just set dressing. They’re part of the book’s DNA.
So, yes: we’ve got the requisite red barn, green tractor with yellow wheels (hi, John Deere 🚜), and a crop circle or two. The audiobook cover even features an alien peeking out of the barn – though logistics are holding that version back for now.
Please note that the Kindle version is available for free for the rest of today (8 Sep 25). Download your copy while you still can without paying through the nose. Leave a review for👍 better or for👎 worse.
But those aliens…
If the composition feels familiar, it should.
The cover is a quiet parody of Grant Wood’s “American Gothic” – a pitchfork-wielding farmer and his companion, stoic before their rural home. It’s one of the most recognisable paintings in American art, and I couldn’t resist twisting it just slightly. Grant was an Iowa boy.
I designed this cover using a flat vector art style, almost like cut paper or stylised children’s book illustrations. The sky is cyan, the land is beige, and everything is built in clean layers: barn, tractor, field, crop circle, and of course… two violet, large-eyed aliens striking a pose.
But no, this isn’t a literal scene from the book. You might encounter violet aliens in Sustenance, but you won’t find them standing around with pitchforks like interstellar Grant Wood impersonators. The image is meant to evoke the tone, not transcribe the events.
Why this style?
Because the story itself is quiet. Subtle. Set in the kind of place often overlooked or written off. The aliens aren’t invading with lasers. They’re… complicated. And the humans, well, aren’t always the best ambassadors of Earth.
The cover reflects that blend of satire, stillness, and unease.
Oh, and one last note: 🛑 No aliens were harmed in the writing of this book.
I don’t want to develop a reputation as an AI apologist – I really don’t. But I do want to strip away the veneer humans so lovingly lacquer over themselves: the idea that art is some mystical emanation of a “soul,” accessible only to those blessed by the Muse and willing to suffer nobly in a garret.
Video: YouTube Short by Jonny Thompson of his interview with Rachel Barr
Rachel Barr argues that AI art can never be the same as human art, no matter how “perfect,” because AI has no feelings or drive. Cue the violins. These arguments always seem to hinge on metaphysical window-dressing. When Rachel says “we”, she’s not talking about humanity at large; she’s talking about herself and a very particular subset of humans who identify as artists. And when she invokes “masters”, the circle shrinks still further, to the cloistered guild who’ve anointed themselves the keepers of aesthetic legitimacy.
But here’s the bit they’d rather you didn’t notice: feelings and drive aren’t prerequisites for art. They’re just one of the many myths humans tell about art, usually the most flattering one. Strip away the Romantic varnish and art is often craft, habit, accident, repetition. A compulsive tic in oil paint. A mistake on the guitar that somehow worked. A poet bashing words together until something sticks.
And I say this not as a detached observer but as a writer, artist, and musician in my own right. I sympathise with the instinct to defend one’s turf, but I don’t need to steep myself in hubris to retain self-worth. My work stands or falls on its own. It doesn’t require a metaphysical monopoly.
So when someone insists AI art can never be “the same,” what they mean is it doesn’t flatter our myths. Because if an algorithm can spit out a perfect sonnet or an exquisite image without the tortured soul attached, then what have we been worshipping all this time? The art itself, or the halo around the artist?
Perhaps the real fear isn’t that AI art lacks feelings. It’s that human art doesn’t require them either. And that’s a blow to the species ego – an ego already so fragile it cracks if you so much as ask whether the Mona Lisa is just paint on a board.
This particular meme has been making the rounds like a drunk uncle at a wedding – loud, colourful, and convinced it’s profound. A Venn diagram, no less! Four big circles stuffed with dystopias, slapped together as if geometry itself conferred wisdom. Most of them are books, a few are films, and one – Gattaca – is glaring at me because I haven’t seen it. That omission alone feels like a character flaw. I might grit my teeth and watch it just to close the loop, though it doesn’t exactly scream, “Pour a glass of wine and enjoy.”
DISCLAIMER: This is not a political post.
Image: Venn Diagram
Here’s the thing: as art, it’s rather lovely. As a piece of intellectual cartography? It’s rubbish. It pretends to classify but in fact it merely collages. Orwell is pressed up against Burgess, Atwood rubs shoulders with Logan’s bloody Run, and in the middle sits Animal Farm, as if pigs with clipboards are somehow the Rosetta Stone of dystopia.
And yet – if you squint just so, tilt your head like a dog hearing a harmonica, you can just about see some tenuous ligatures:
Surveillance and conditioning: 1984, Clockwork Orange, and The Matrix all insist that the human mind is clay to be moulded by boot, syringe, or simulation.
Reproduction and regulation: Brave New World, The Handmaid’s Tale, and yes, Gattaca (apparently) fret endlessly over who gets to breed, who gets culled, and whose DNA deserves a future.
Bodies as resource: Soylent Green, Brazil, Gattaca again – people ground down into spreadsheets, rations, or literal mince.
The veneer of civilisation: Lord of the Flies and Animal Farm showing us that civilisation is just papier-mâché over the swamp.
But let’s be honest: the diagram isn’t actually saying this. It’s just four intersecting blobs, with titles hurled in like darts at a pub quiz. The apparent “structure” is nothing more than meme-magic – order conjured out of chaos to make you nod gravely as you scroll by.
So yes: as art, it works. As a Venn diagram, it’s a travesty. And maybe that’s the deeper joke. We live in an age where every complexity gets crushed into an infographic, every horror squeezed into a digestible meme. Which, if you think about it, is itself a bit dystopian.
It is all well and good that experienced people share their advice with neophytes, with those who are less practised, less confident, or simply eager to imitate. There is nothing inherently wrong with offering footholds. This particular video, for instance, sets out ten strategies for the opening paragraph, each supposedly designed to stop readers from bolting at the first hurdle. For the green and anxious, a checklist can feel like a lifeline.
But here is the rub. The first rule of writing, which is also the first rule of art, is that there are no rules. There are, admittedly, a near-infinite number of bad ideas – every creative writing workshop is proof of that – but this abundance of failure does not magically distil into a shortlist of approved techniques. “Best practice” is a managerial fiction dressed up as gospel.
Video: First Paragraph Strategies
NB: I am not disparaging John Fox, Bookfox, or this video. I am commenting on the notion of writing formulae. I found the tips informative and on-point, but in the end, you are the artist.
Yes, if you are working in a commercial genre, there are conventions and tropes that must be acknowledged. A murder mystery without a corpse is merely awkward, and a romance without union or rupture is simply wishful thinking. But let us be clear: these are expectations, not commandments. They are signposts, not shackles.
The danger of this kind of advice is not that it is wrong, but that it is received as dogma. If every first paragraph dutifully obeyed these ten tricks, the outcome would not be ten compelling openings but ten perfectly interchangeable ones. Predictability, not incompetence, is the real enemy of writing. To follow rules too tightly is to aim directly at cliché.
And yet the defence is equally obvious. A novice often requires boundaries, if only to resist paralysis. “Begin here, avoid this, try that.” Advice of this sort can be useful scaffolding, and scaffolding, while inelegant, keeps the building upright until the architect has a design. The problem arises when people mistake the scaffolding for the cathedral.
So the honest conclusion is double-edged. Watch the video if you like. Steal what steadies you, ignore what doesn’t. But do not imagine that art is born from lists. At best, such advice can prevent you from falling flat on your face; at worst, it convinces you that walking in circles is the same thing as running.
Let’s get this out of the way: Sturgeon’s Law, ‘90% of everything is crap‘, isn’t pessimism, it’s statistics. That includes your favourite novel, the collected works of Joyce, and, yes, AI-generated text. The key point? If AI has the same bell curve as human output, some slice of that curve will still be better than what most people write. If Pareto’s Rule feels better at 80%, I’ll cede that ten points.
90% of everything is crap
— Sturgeon’s Law
And before anyone gets misty-eyed about “human genius,” let’s remember that the average American adult reads at a 7th or 8th grade level, and more than half read at or below a 6th grade level. Nearly 1 in 5 reads below a 3rd grade level. That’s not a moral failing, but it is a market reality. We can wail about AI not producing the next Nabokov, but let’s be honest, Nabokov isn’t exactly topping the Costco bestsellers table.
Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic
Here’s the bit nobody wants to say out loud
AI doesn’t have to dethrone the literary elite. It just has to outperform the mass of competent-but-unremarkable human writers serving an audience who, frankly, doesn’t care about “stylistic nuance” or “metafictional self-reflexivity.”
There’s a vast literary middle ground – corporate copywriting, trade journalism, formulaic romance, SEO blogs – where AI will not just compete, but dominate, because the audience is reading for function, not art.
The high-literary crowd will remain untouched, partly because their readership fetishises human intentionality, and partly because AI doesn’t yet want to write about the precise smell of sadness in a damp Parisian garret in 1934.
The fearmongering about AI “killing literature” is a bit like saying instant ramen will kill haute cuisine. Yes, more people will eat the ramen, but Alain Ducasse isn’t sweating over his stock reduction.
More than half of American adults read at or below a sixth-grade level.
The printing press was supposed to obliterate the artistry of the hand-copied manuscript. Instead, it made books accessible and created new genres entirely. Calligraphy still exists, it’s just no longer the only way to get words on a page.
Photography was going to end painting. In reality, it freed painters from the burden of strict representation, allowing impressionism, cubism, and abstract art to flourish.
Recorded music didn’t destroy live performance, it expanded its reach. Some audiences still pay obscene amounts to see an actual human sweat on stage.
Film didn’t kill theatre; it created a parallel art form.
Synthesizers didn’t erase orchestras; they just meant you didn’t have to mortgage your house to hear a string section in your pop song.
AI is simply the next entrant in this long tradition of “threats” that turn out to be expansions. It will colonise the big islands of the creative archipelago – commercial writing, functional prose, genre boilerplate – and leave the small monasteries of high art mostly untouched.
So, no, AI won’t be the next Mozart, Picasso, or Nabokov. But it doesn’t need to be. It just needs to be good enough to meet – and occasionally exceed – the expectations of the largest share of the market. And given that most readers are happy if the plot makes sense, the spelling’s passable, and the ending doesn’t require a graduate seminar in semiotics to decipher, I’d say AI’s prospects are rather good.
Here’s why that 10% still matters
The rarefied work of the serious literary writer isn’t competing for market share; it’s preserving and evolving the cultural and linguistic possibilities of human expression. That work thrives not because it’s the only thing available, but precisely because it stands apart from the sea of functional prose, human or machine-made. The AI tide will rise, but the lighthouse will still be human.
I’m sharing a comp of the cover art* for my upcoming novel – a story about a prostitute. More accurately, it’s a story about prostitutes, addiction, survival, and the consequences of living at the periphery – not just of society, but of personhood itself.
The earliest notes I have are dated 2019. I finished the first draft in June. I’m now editing – both structurally and line by line, which is probably a bad idea, but here we are. Because I’m reorganising scenes, I need to ensure the transitions make sense, emotionally and narratively.
Since completing the draft, I’ve been reading Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex. First published in 1949, the edition I’m reading was translated in 2011. It’s given me language for something I was already trying to do.
“One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.”
— Simone de Beauvoir
This line is central to my approach. My protagonist isn’t born a prostitute. More importantly, she isn’t even born a woman. She’s made into one by church ladies, jealous sisters, careless boys, and indifferent systems. Through gestures, punishments, expectations, and neglect. Through the crucible of a society that offers her a script before she understands the stage.
Yes, her psychology matters. But the world matters more.
That’s what I’m trying to explore — not just the facts of a life on the edge, but the forces that shape it.
* I’ve actually designed two covers – one for hardcover and the other for paperback. It provides me with options.
Ridley Park 