I used to think AI was the devil.
Not in a dramatic, dystopian way. It was a kind of unease which crept in when I understood that a machine could accomplish something that previously only humans could manage.
Writing, for example.
When tools like ChatGPT started producing essays, poems and stories in seconds, my first reaction wasn’t curiosity. It was a nervous tickle in the throat.
If a machine can write… then what am I doing here?
For a while I reduced AI to one very simple scenario. You ask it to write something. It writes it. The human quietly exits the stage.
Efficient. Impressive.
Terrifying.
But somewhere along the way my relationship with AI began to shift. Not via a single aha! moment, but gradually, through experimenting with it.
And then without meaning to, I had started using AI as a place to think.
At first it was small things. Testing an idea. Asking a question which I couldn’t quite answer on my own. Wrangling different storylines into some kind of order at the end of a novel which is a task I have quietly agonised over.
Then something else started happening.
I would return to the same conversation weeks later and pick up the thread exactly where I left it. Two months later, the same thing. Sometimes even longer. The idea was still sitting there, waiting patiently, as if no time had passed. My friends, while amazingly supportive, don’t have the time, the inclination or the capacity to match this and nor have I expected them to.
Meanwhile, the characters in my novel had shifted in my head. A question I’d been avoiding became harder to ignore. The strands were coming together, not perfectly, mind you, but the constant refining of themes in my novel helped set the course for landing.
Whenever I returned to the conversation, the machine still held the scaffolding of earlier thinking which I could build on.
That’s when it occurred to me I had accidentally outsourced part of my internal monologue.
Not my thinking. Just the place where some of that thinking occurs.
For someone who writes fiction, that realisation was strangely unsettling at first.
Part of me had believed that writing a novel was for the hardy. The stubborn. The people willing to sit alone with imaginary people for years until the story slowly reveals itself.
So when people said AI can write novels, my first reaction was defensive.
What happens to the rest of us then?
But the more I’ve used it, the less it feels like a replacement and more like a sounding board.
I can test a scene. Explore a character’s backstory. Ask whether a certain idea holds together. Sometimes the responses are helpful. Sometimes they’re completely wrong. But even that has value, because it forces me to clarify what I actually think.
The novel still belongs to me. The emotional labour is still mine. The slow process of figuring out what the story is about unfolds in the messy way it always has and the writing is mine.
If anything, AI just gives the thinking a little more room to move.
So now when people ask whether AI will replace writers, I find myself thinking a slightly different thought.
Not will it replace us?
But how might we use it well?
If it can hold fragments of my thinking once so quickly forgotten in the real world, reflect ideas back to me, and keep conversations alive across months while I slowly figure things out, then maybe it isn’t replacing my mind.
Maybe it’s extending it.
Which, when you think about it, is exactly the sort of tool humans have been inventing for thousands of years.