I don’t know how long we’re going to have to suffer through the hype years of AI, but we’re definitely there now and I can only wish that it will be over soon. I use AI apps for transcription of interviews and videos and audios, it’s fantastic how much better all of that is now that I don’t have to be the one manually winding back a tape a syllable or two at a time. And ultimately, that’s where we’re heading because that’s where we’ve already been: AI was the word of 2023, but AI was already behind at least many years of technology development that we already enjoy.

So when your iPhone suggests the correct spelling of Beiderbecke, or remembers that when you email me you usually also email these two other people so it offers you their names, that’s AI. When your iPhone offers you news headlines in the morning, it’s because it’s spotted that you regularly look up news headlines in the morning.

You didn’t once think it was AI, nor even Machine Learning as Apple has been calling it since at least 2016, you just accepted the suggested names if they were right and ignored them if they were wrong.

Android or iPhone, these devices have been using AI or machine learning for ages and it’s all good, none of it threatens our work, most of it helps and none of it gets in our way.

And yet at the moment I see people claiming that writers will be replaced by AI, or that writers can use AI in order to spend less time writing. I do believe that such people are the same ones who will tell you they’ve got a great idea for a film, they just need you to write it and they’ll split the millions with you.

But more specifically, I am now thinking of one claim in particular, a course that advertised itself as being how to use AI as your co-writer and muse. The workshop has been taken down so I can’t check the details, but I remember it being something about how AI can free you up to spend your time doing things other than writing.

Listen. Nobody is forcing you to write.

And if you have a problem with the thousands of hours it takes to write anything, the answer is not AI. It’s tough shit.

I don’t doubt that AI will get better, In fact, I think it will become so very much more useful for everyone that at some point quite soon we are going to forget the term “AI” and just think of it has how things work, if we think of it at all.

But if AI really does somehow get so good that it forges in the smithy of its soul the uncreated consciousness of its race, then I still won’t care. If you can’t be arsed to write it, I fail to see why I should spend my time reading it.

Or to put it another way, go read the script to Barbie and tell me anything but talented people could — or would — write that ridiculous, joyous, moving screenplay.