A WRITER’S STATEMENT ON GENERATIVE A.I.

25 August 2026

 

 

I don’t want to talk about AI. 

 

I want to talk about creativity and imagination. I want to talk about reality and truth. About nature and the body. About learning and growth.

 

But everybody around me is talking about AI.

 

All. The. Time.

 

Here’s what I think of your AI.

 

• Large-language models and AI image generators are trained on copyrighted works stolen from authors and artists. When you use AI, you endorse theft.

• AI data centres consume vast quantities of electricity and water, often in resource-poor areas, sometimes with serious consequences for vulnerable populations. Every single use of generative AI exacts a toll. When you use AI, you harm the climate, the earth, and other people.

• AI technology is owned by American billionaires aligned with white supremacy and right-wing, authoritarian ideology. When you use AI, you collaborate with some of the worst people on the planet.

 

These three facts scratch the surface, but they’re enough. AI is not “just a tool” — it’s a choice. There are no ethical use cases for generative AI.

 

Generative Artificial Intelligence is based on trawling through vast amounts of data to identify patterns. The current crop of chatbots uses those underlying patterns to recombine the elements on which it has been trained to form outputs that have the appearance of novel creations.

 

Tech bros say there’s no point resisting the infiltration of AI into every aspect of our lives. It’s “inevitable.” 

 

Maybe they’re right. After all, their plagiarism machines have been foisted on us at every turn without our say. Opting out presents a challenge.

 

But that’s not the primary way they could be right. They could be right because so many people use AI willingly, and consume its productions uncritically. People who should know better. 

 

They’ve heard the warnings, but are beguiled by the bland smoothness of AI’s outputs. They offload more and more cognitive tasks to the machine, building a habit, creating a dependence. Every day they get a little bit dumber.

 

This battle is not over, though. Not even close.

 

AI feeds on human creativity. AI has no ability to create on its own. Only humans create. If AI slop makes its way into training sets, the machines risk sliding into a cesspit of their own cannibalized clichéd nonsense. For that reason, AI must constantly be fed a diet of freshly stolen creative work. 

 

And that’s what we have to fight.

 

In the meantime, rampant, unregulated AI is here, and humans working in the creative fields must grapple with some immediate issues.

 

Unlike the more familiar forms of plagiarism, for which evidence might be marshalled, AI use is difficult if not impossible to prove. Much AI detection software is either snake oil or just more AI, or both.

 

I have sympathy for small literary publishers who face increasing numbers of AI-generated or AI-assisted submissions.

 

I have even more sympathy for fellow writers. 

 

If AI use is hard to prove, so is its opposite: that a piece of writing is original and genuine. At any time, any writer might have their work called into question. We can avoid using AI, but we can’t ignore it.

 

I hate generative AI. I especially hate how it’s changed my writing practice.

 

Formerly, I kept only the current version of any work in progress. I shredded and deleted all previous drafts. No going back!

 

Now I keep a fat file of successive drafts, should an editor or publisher feel the need to see my homework – to examine how a piece developed under my own hand over time.

 

I would welcome a conversation with an editor about how one of my essays came to be – my intentions, the rationale behind my choices, my creative process. Why wouldn’t I? It seems a minor concession.

 

But I resent having to make any concession to a technology I never needed nor wanted. Imagine sculptors crawling their studio floors on hands and knees collecting chips and shavings to prove their art is solely the work of their hearts and hands – all because some rich Silicon Valley transhumanist whack job made a robot. 

 

It sucks. But it would suck more to be unable to defend myself against an accusation of plagiarism. That would devastate me.

 

I believe in the unwritten contract between author and reader: that a piece of writing is a communication from one human soul to another. Generative AI is an anti-human abomination that has no legitimate purpose in the hands of creative people. 

 

But I don’t want to talk about AI.

 

I want to talk about creativity and imagination. I want to talk about reality and truth. About nature and the body. About learning and growth – difficult and inconvenient and inefficient human learning and growth! Everything that is close to the joyous heart of being alive.