He Didn’t Know He Had Ideas

Every week the timeline splits into two camps: the people using AI to write everything and saying nothing about it, and the people swearing they never will. They shout past each other so loudly that almost nobody has clocked the far stranger thing happening underneath.

There’s a man I’ve never met who told the internet he wrote a novel with a machine and found out, somewhere in the doing of it, that he had ideas. He seemed astonished. Stunned, really, the way you’d be stunned to open a cupboard you’d walked past for years and find it stuffed with cash you never knew was in there. He didn’t know it was in there. And he said so, plainly, to a few thousand strangers, most of whom rolled up their sleeves to explain that he ought to be ashamed of himself.

Because that same week, on that same endless scrolling feed, the writers were out in force. The real ones, or at least the ones who’ll tell you they’re the real ones. They post their positions like commandments chipped into stone. I will never use AI. It is theft, it is cheating, it is the slow poisoning of something holy. And there on the wrong side of the line they’d drawn stood our man with his novel and his cupboard full of money, looking pleased with himself and about to be told off for it.

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