AI is destroying the creative community.

I’ve done ten years as a ghostwriter and in that time, never struggled for work. I’ve written around 350 novels, either with plots from clients or from my own head, although none of them have my name.

This is the first time that my steady stream of work has begun to dwindle.

Thankfully, I’m in a place where I don’t need it to be my daily bread and butter, where I’m not relying on that work for income. But that’s only happened recently and honestly, up until that point, I was really beginning to worry.

Nowadays, you won’t find many clients who are fervently against AI. In fact, the majority of them will have ‘willing to use AI’ in the job description. I’ve seen job postings where they want a real life human person to go through a book written by AI to make sure it ‘has all the feels’. What’s worse, I’ve noticed recently that even blog posts or (worse still) social media posts are either entirely AI written or have used AI to help.

Up until a few months ago, I would never have found a client who was eager for me to use AI. They trusted my work, my ratings and my feedback from previous clients. Now, the world seems to revolve on the belief that ‘AI does it better’.

Yesterday, I was reading an article written by a local person and caught myself thinking that it had a different feel compared to their previous work. A quick check and I discovered I was right. (I am well aware that not all AI detectors are reliable and most, I’d say, have a high inaccuracy rate. The two I use are the best of the best, still not entirely accurate but usually on the money.)

When did people stop being able to write their own Facebook posts? When did we lose the ability to write a blog post without using AI to help? When did we decide that AI can write a better article about farming in a heatwave than a living, breathing human who actually experienced it?

The way things are going, I’m not convinced they’re going to get better. Yes, there are definitely always going to be clients who don’t want AI and will refuse any mention of it, but my belief is that more and more people will use it because it is free, quick and simple. We live in a day and age where everything is hurried, everything is rushed and ‘snap your fingers and Amazon’s dropped a parcel on your doorstep’. Very few people want – or can – take the time to sit down, breathe, think about what they want to communicate to the world and then write it.

I include myself in that. It’s a battle.

But it’s a battle worth fighting.

Don’t believe the lie that AI can write it better than you ever could. Your individual voice is Perseus, holding up a shield. We want to know what it felt like for you to be out during the heatwave, worrying about crop stress and how best to mitigate it. We want to hear your voice when we read a Facebook post about small businesses and tourism. We want to read about your feelings when you were out on the sea and saw the great stacks rising up to meet you.

AI didn’t experience any of those things. It doesn’t have a voice. It just copies the voices of others and then twists them together into something that looks wonderful but is really just the head of Medusa.

It’ll turn us all to stone if we let it.