I saw an advertisement for something called Designerr. They were saying ‘Publish a book in minutes without writing a single word’.

As a writer, I think this is disgusting. I emailed them to their help line, which was the only method of getting in touch unless you wanted to sign up, and got a reply asking how they could help me. I’ve just sent the following reply.

This is not a plea for help, it’s just me giving my opinion. AI ‘writing’ books is a terrible idea. It cannot understand what it’s doing, nor the underlying craft of writing. It only knows what words usually follow another.

AI knows nothing of people and their emotions, which are important parts of writing meaningful books. The stuff it churns out is dreadful, so I’ve been told.

AI can only learn from scraping books already published by hard-working authors who spend many months, or even years getting a book to a standard where it’s ready for publishing. Many of these books that are scraped are pirated, too.

To suggest that someone can publish a book in minutes without writing a single word is disgusting, and an insult to genuine authors.

And you are taking work away from real writers!

My opinion. I suppose you’ll have yours. I’d be interested to hear from you about it.