So, in the AGI future that has been foisted upon me and my life's purpose and work, how do I proceed as a writer, and a reader?

As a writer, the choice is simple and straightforward: I will continue to research, write and rewrite my own work. I will hire freelancers to produce the five editions of each book. My work will remain AI free. No question. Business as usual.

As an avid reader with a large library (a two roomer), I will never, knowingly, read anything produced or part produced by AI.

But this poses a significant dilemma. How will I know if a book has been written by a human, or produced by AI software? Or a combination of the two? Apparently, it's impossible to be sure. Just look at the destruction of course work in higher education. To be required to now consider the contamination of AI in what I read, makes me detest the tech even more.

Now, just let that sink in: we can no longer trust books. Can you see what has been done to one of the most important achievements, resources and treasures of mankind? We cannot trust books now. Unforgiveable.

So, on a case by case basis, from 2025, I will discriminate even more about what I read, and who I read. Some authors I can confidently assume - as much as I can assume anything - would never touch the tech. They don't need it either because they're the real deal. Beyond them, I will be forced to be extremely cautious and vigilant. If I am burned, or if AI generated "documents" begin masquerading as real books, or the use of the tech becomes normalised in new publications, then I will be forced to opt out of buying and reading all new books, at a date of my choosing in the near future.

Worth noting that no one is legally required to state that AI was used in the authorship of a book. I haven't come across any meaningful regulation. Staggering.

My future relationship with new publications feels radical. But you have to be all in. There is no compromise anymore, not as a writer; and, for me, not as a reader. No half measures. You cannot be vague, nor can you procrastinate. In effect, a civil war has begun that no one wanted or asked for. Choose the banner that you will serve under.

As much as tech companies and sections of the media, and people invested in using the tech and profiting from it, and the misguided and disinvested, will assert that this AI creep into books is inevitable, or progress, and there are those who will do everything in their power to convince you that AI in books is acceptable, identify the fog of war for what it is. Even if we lose, we will have been allied honourably for a good cause. And those who use the tech will never be real writers; they will be cheats and starved of the approval of the genuine and honourable. And who knows, we can hope that a few of them will be handed their arses in court.

I feel real sadness for the real writers of the future. But when I look at the vast repository of great works written and published before the advent of the AI plague, I take immense comfort and solace in the fact that I will never be short of something good to read that was written by a human.

If, by some combination of keywords, the AI produces something that appears competent, you didn't create it; nor does this make you creative. The technology can only perform this function, at your prompting, because it has been illegally trained on the work of real writers. Tinkering with the output, editing it and rearranging it, doesn't make you a writer either. Every derivative produced was produced by the software, not you.

If you truly love books but use AI to make them, you are destroying what you love. And once you have destroyed what you love, what then?

Very few people master anything. To master anything, innate ability is required, as well as a significant investment of time and a sense of purpose. To be original, you also need vision. There are no shortcuts. Any other method is cheating. The constant promise of tech companies that their apps will "unleash your creativity" is a shameful lie. It's a heinousÌýform of neo-Marxist propaganda. What this means is: no one is exceptional, everyone is the same, everyone is not only creative, but equally creative. Which any rational person knows is BS. There has only ever been one Shakespeare.

So, if you are taking shortcuts and cheating and destroying what you profess to love, what is your motivation? Laziness, self-deception, competitiveness, greed, uncertainty about what you are doing with your life? Or is it something malicious, like envy and resentment directed at those who have accomplished something - "look, what I can do too!" Only you're not creating anything - the software is producing something and you're cheating. What are you displacing?

Of equal importance to writers, in this catastrophe and in this entire space, are the readers. They're hard to attract. Their appearanceÌýand interest and appreciation is a magical process. Once they appear, they invite other readers to read the same books. To keep readers reading your books, you need to build trust with a readership and you can't let them down. This can take decades (in my case). It's a contract and connection so precious, it is sacrosanct. AI produced/part produced books betray and cheat readers and kill all of the magic. Forever.

So, folks, if you are using AI to "produce" books, or part produce books, you and I are done. It's over.

Every single time that someone cheats and uses AI to provide a story, or provide a character, or rewrite a description, another part of culture withers, another threat to human talent and expressionÌýis sent into the world. What we're then reading will not be truthful, not sincere, not genuine, not even human, and a betrayal of human endeavour.

But, if you intended to pull off the biggest theft of culture in the history of mankind, in order to exploit it for your own gain, you'd hope that what you've done can't be undone; and to avoid litigation until the end of universe, you'd want what you've stolen to be laundered into derivatives in just such a way as to make it impossible to accurately detect the usage of the stolen source material. I see a pattern emerging.

This all follows years of meÌýsending takedown messages to pirated book websites with mixed results - if they're Russian like LibGen (now there's a fucking surprise), forget it. I want to write books, and publish them, and not spend my time and capacity drafting andÌýsending out takedown notices, and filling in endless fields at licensing websites, and reading scores of articles on just how far I have been held upside down by my ankles and shaken hard, before having my rights desecrated.

Now, the British govt, in all of its wisdom and desperation to dig itself out of a financial hole, and to not get left behind, suggests that training AI on copyrighted works should be, more or less, fair usage. This is the "Data (Use and Access) Bill". And I'm going to guess that those sympathetic to the tech industry advised them on its creation.

According to the proposals in the bill, the only way that I can prevent my work being used to train AI, would be for me toÌý"Opt out" all of my books, in every single edition, in every single territory, rather than "Opt in". So each and every ISBN generated for each edition of all of my books (hence the 216 cited above) will have to be separately "opted out" - yet what about short stories in multi-author collections? What if you missed an old eBook edition from 10 years ago? It's just not workable or practical. An opt-in arrangement, however, would be: unless stated by the author that their work can be used to train AI, tech companies and users of AI are forbidden to touch the work. But that's not in favour of the tech companies, is it?ÌýAnd everything has already been scraped and can't be "unlearned", so all of this opting out is only applicable toÌýfuture works. How many times must I be forced by AI to piss into strong headwinds?

This bill also suggests that the derivatives shat out the other end can be copyright protected. It beggars belief. So, you'd be sanctioning copyright infringement of all existing human created books, but would legally protect the derivatives resulting from this theft?

Mercifully, the House of Lords has asked for amendments - "forcing AI crawlers to observe UK copyright law, reveal their identities and purpose, and let creatives know if their copyrighted works have been scraped."

To my dismay, the only factor included in these discussions appears to be money, revenue, transfer of wealth, etc. Something far more valuable is at stake: our ability as a species to think abstractly and to make sense of ourselves, the world, our place in time, and to preserve the most important facets of storytelling that carry the wisdom of the ages,Ìýthrough every successive generation of our species. And let's not discard the neurological and psychological and social impact of making people stupid and making truth irrelevant through tech. I get a sense that everything is at stake.

So, I have alsoÌýtaken part in the lengthy 'Consultation on Copyright and Artificial Intelligence' to explain just how unfair this legislation is, and what the dire consequences will be for writers, and for humanÌýcreated culture. The idea that culture is fodder for AI muck sprayers, and only has the worth that tech companies assign to it, is just too staggering to comprehend.

If this post disappears, or my SM accounts are suddenly placed in hiatus, I won't have deactivated myself. Just so you know.

Carl was kind enough to send me a print that I will frame and add to my walls of horror, and I've included an image of his Cunning FolkÌýartwork below.

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And for Spanish readers, a Spanish translation and edition is underway at my long-time Spanish publisher, .

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