Freelance Traveller

#77: Is there a point anymore?

Originally appeared in the July/August 2025 issue.

If I give up writing, it won’t be because generative AI has put me out of a job, well –  maybe that too, but because I can’t bear the assumption of some that I’m using it.

I dared to show my first attempt at a runyonesque short story (‘Benni Loses a Case’) to a work colleague and her immediate reaction was ‘you got AI to write this, didn’t you?’. Well, no. I’ve been thinking about the idea for some years having fallen in love with Runyon’s Broadway storiesOnly 99p for an omnibus collection on Amazon Kindle when I looked just now... which I first discovered when I learned that Oliver Dickinson’s wonderful Griselda stories in the pages of White Dwarf were a pastiche of the style.  I was sure there was room for something similar in the Traveller universe. 

Having worked my way through four Runyon collections, I thought I was beginning to get a handle on the style which has even earned its own word in the dictionary.  Having said that, the one thing I did learn actually writing my own is that it’s harder than it looks.  I also gained a greater appreciation of just how brilliant Runyon is.

What finally got me writing, however, was that said work colleague and I have been discussing generative AI – it’s currently forming a large chunk of our day jobs as students are now using it willy-nilly, we have to write referencing guides for academic use of it, and more and more of the databases we subscribe to and demonstrate are introducing AI assistants of one kind or another.  A month ago, we were discussing whether ChatGPT 4 is good enough to produce something like Samantha Harvey’s Orbital – the recent Booker prize winner which we’d both read and enjoyed.  I feared it is getting close and tried to demonstrate that, getting it to produce four ‘days’ of what I called ‘Circulation’ with each day divided into Borrowing and Returning (in the manner of Harvey’s Ascending and Descending as the ISS orbits the earth).  I don’t think the style was Booker prize worthy, but it did a creditable job with characters that seemed believable and interesting and dialogue that was probably better than I could do.  (I admit to being no great shakes at dialogue.)

So perhaps, after that, it wasn’t unreasonable that my colleague thought I’d ‘cheated’ with Benni, although I could assure her it was all my own workWell, including lots of inspiration from Runyon, of course. Why would I want to give up the fun stuff of creation to AI and not the dull stuff?

The snag is that if I have any USP as my colleague – the Business Librarian – would say, it’s in being able to write quickly on quite a wide variety of topics.  Perhaps not well, but good enough for the purposes.  Now with generative AI, pretty much anyone can do similar.

You can be the judge of whether Benni is worth bothering with (two other colleagues at work and our esteemed editor seemed to think it was), but I am left wondering what’s the point of me?!

Author’s Note: This Confession was handwritten by myself and AI had no part in it.