A couple of years ago a friend (and fellow novelist) joined Ninja Writers, my online writing school. He wanted to participate in one of our feedback workshops.
Basically — in these workshops everyone brings some of their work. They take turns reading out loud and getting feedback from the other writers in the Zoom room.
He participated a couple of times and I finally had to talk to him, privately. The gist of that conversation was something along the lines of — Dude, what in the hell is this?
His writing was strange. Hollow. I couldn’t quite put my finger on it, but it was shallow somehow. All the parts were there, but it lacked depth. He got feedback along those lines every week, but brought back similar writing the next time.
Of course, people are at different points in their writing careers. And I wasn’t judging him. In fact, Ninja Writers was designed for new writers. It’s just that I could tell something was off, but I couldn’t figure out what it was.
We were friends, so I could ask the dude, what the hell question of him in a way that I wouldn’t have asked a student. His answer was: AI wrote it and he wanted to see if he could make it pass a group of readers.
It took me about half an hour to understand what he was talking about. This was well before ChatGBT was a thing. I’d never heard of AI writing a novel before. Or fiction at all.
But he’d bought a program or an app or something. I can’t remember now what it was, except that he fed it ideas and it spit out stories. He told me that I needed to learn how to do it, too, because pretty soon I’d be out of a job. But I knew, right in that moment, that he was wrong.