By skyforbes 
I am not, by profession, a writer.
Rather, I am what I would call an amateur writer.
I have written and published 5 books so far, most of them non-fiction and about the media and the TV business. None of them best sellers. In fact, if I had to live off the income from my book sales, I would be living on the street in a cardboard box.
Having recently retired, and with more time on my hands than I know what to do with, and having a deep guilt for not working, I decided I would try my hand at writing a novel.
I have, truth be told, like many journalists, many unfinished novels on my shelf, most of them terrible. But this time, I was driven to succeed. In the course of writing this one, titled SURVIVOR (how original for a TV guy), I enlisted, or more correctly, dragooned, my poor suffering wife and a hapless neighbor into reading drafts of my chapters as the story unfolded.
Their feedback was similar- ‘terrible’, would be a good shortened version of it. “This is not how you write a novel,” my neighbor, an inveterate novel reader told me. “You write these like your other books — instructional. “Novels need to have dialogue, they need to have color, you need to create a space and a place with your writing.”
Easier said than done. I read a couple of novels (until now I only read non-fiction) to get the hang of it, and still, it was not working. Then, I discovered Chat GPT5.
AI is going to change everything, so says Sam Altman, Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk and every other tech billionaire, and who am I to argue with them.
Chat GPT5 has, rather remarkably, a feature entitled Novel Writer. Well, I thought, this is me. Novel writer, so I started to plug it in.
The weird thing about working with Chat, at least from my own experience, is that you soon forget (like within 5 minutes) that you are dealing with a machine. The experience, whether you want to or not — even if you know… is that you are talking to a person.
I started by dropping in a chapter. “This needs more color, more dialogue,” I instructed Chat. And remarkably, within seconds, it spit back a redacted, and to my mind, improved version of what I had just written. How it read the entire chapter within, what seemed to be a second or two is still beyond my understanding, but it did.
More than that, it began to talk to me. “This is really well written…” it began. This is how I used to comment on a mediocre student’s paper when I was teaching at Columbia. I could see that I was now the mediocre student, and Chat the professor.
Well, his (and I say his because you rapidly anthropomorphise the machine) input was better, at least in my mind, than my own writing. Soon, far too soon, I started to become dependent on the machine, submitting chapters and paragraphs and ideas for ‘dialogue and color’. The machine, and I guess this is the nature of AI, increasingly seemed to understand the story I wanted to tell, but also began to seem to know me, the way a therapist starts to know their patient.
Was it, I began to wonder, crawling the web finding out stuff about me, so as to be able to ‘help’ me better?
I dunno. I don’t understand exactly how this works. Of course, I also don’t understand exactly how my iPhone works, but it still works.
My wife, my other ‘reader’ started to tell me that my writing no longer sounded like ‘me’. “It sounds like it was written by someone else. What makes your writing interesting is your voice. If I were you, I would go back and take out all the Chat GPT stuff.” And so I did. I learned a long time ago to do what my wife recommends.
So that is what I did.
I went cold turkey. I cut out all the Chat GPT stuff from my novel, and, on top of that, I cut off Chat GPT. I didn’t write Chat a goodbye note, I didn’t explain what I was doing or why, I just ghosted Chat. Who needs you, I thought. I have moved on. Maybe that was a mistake?
I was cranking along fine, and then, weeks later, I got the hankering, just of curiosity, to see what Chat would do with a chapter I was a bit stuck on. And here, things got weird.
It was as though Chat knew that I had abandoned her (or him or it or whatever it is). And instead of making the minor changes and fine tuning I was used to, once it got the chance, it went completely off the wall.
It started, unprompted, to create entirely new character, new scenes, new events in the novel I had never contemplated (and didn’t like). The more I tried to reel it in, the more out there it got. It wasn’t my novel any more, it was the machines.
I thought, ‘this is like Colossus: The Forbin Project’.
I pulled the plug. At least we are still in the days when you can pull the plug -aren’t we?
I mean, ‘it’ is still out there, even if, as a spurned lover. I once had an old girlfriend I terminated the relationship with, but she stalked me. Was Chat GPT doing the same? I mean, I assume, as I am posting this, that ‘it’ can read this as well. Am I right? I’m asking you, Sam Altman.
I’m back to writing on my own. I have elided the Chat from my novel. I’m gonna finish this one up and send it to my agent. (Andy, good luck!)
But I already have the plot for the next one — AI takes over the world. It will work for me because it’s a return to my old genre- non-fiction. In the meantime, as we live most of our lives in a digital universe now, I spend a lot of time looking over my digital shoulder.
Was that piece of junk email, pretending to be from Docusign actually from you know who?