Oh, no I don't!

**This post now includes a video which backs up my article. Fellow writers and anyone who reads books and articles are encouraged to read this post to the end and to watch the video when you come to it.**

As time goes by, new ways and styles of writing seem to be produced out of thin air. Some of them are good, some of them are reasonable and some of them beggar belief. And it is that last option that I wish to concentrate on here.

I am a true believer in researching and writing my own work. The interested reader might consider that some of my stuff is brilliant (how I wish!) while other jottings not so much. I tend to write as I find and as I speak. Sometimes, that's unfortunate for the grammar police to comprehend but, what the heck? My blog site so my rules, as the saying goes, at least that's how it could be viewed and accepted.

I try to ensure that my work is readable, enjoyable and thought-provoking. From the feedback I've received over the years, I must be doing something right. Maybe there's the odd clanger mixed in but that can be inevitable whoever the writer or author is. Talking of which, I have always considered myself as being a writer, even though I have 'authored' several books and more than you can imagine, both under my own name and noms de plume or pen names. What is the difference? For me, I think it is stature. I have been a writer for most of my life, whereas I have only been considered an author since I had my first book published, so in my eyes that still makes me a writer.

With the best of intentions, I do not go out of my way to upset anybody when I am in writer mode. However, sometimes it can be unavoidable that, something not so glamorous can be written about somebody or something. It happens but it is never intentional and whoever the writer is generally isn't cruising for a bruising in 'put yer Dukes up' style.

But there is one recently introduced new 'style' that has crept into the authors' bed that is beginning to threaten the whole enjoyment of reading. It can also have severe implications with how new written work is conceived and offered. I am talking here about Artificial Intelligence (AI). Like a bad penny, AI keeps reappearing, so much so that would-be buyers of the latest blockbuster novel cannot be sure if it has been written by a human or a robotic-like being that has been cleverly programmed to fake the real thing.

Recent analysis and reports have hinted that even some of the most famous and prolific writers have erred on the side of self-destruction by employing AI to write their newest books. Could you imagine what it would be like for readers to find out that books coming onto the market have not actually been crafted by their favourite authors but instead by AI? According to research (not mine), that's the way the book market appears to be going and, I am happy to say that I refuse to be a part of it.

Everything you read on this blog site, or even in my books, is written by me. I am not a robot and I do not go around screaming 'exterminate! exterminate!' if you don't read my work. Obviously, I would dearly like you to try my stuff for size now and again, but that is your own judgment call. The only AI that I occasionally may include is the odd graphic here or there to illustrate my jottings. I have been involved with graphic design for well over 40 years so a lot of the time I prepare my own graphics but, just sometimes, I do find the need to ask for AI assistance. Prior to AI becoming a norm in everyone's life I had to stick at it until I was able to produce my own images. But, all of my written content is my own work, guaranteed.

So, how would you or could you confirm what I say about my written work is true? Well, there's the irony. There are online websites that can supposedly reveal whether a human or AI wrote a piece of work. By copying and pasting something that looks or smells suspiciously like it has been written by AI into a box on such a website and it should be able to tell whether a human or an automaton wrote the piece. Unfortunately, those websites are AI-run, hence the irony. I can quite easily invite you to copy and paste any of my written work into an AI-detection website but, you'd be none the wiser, simply because AI cannot tell for certain if a human has written the pasted item or not. It's an anomaly that is going to catch quite a few (a lot!) of readers and writers out long into the future.

I'll give you a couple of 'for instances' here. I have copied and pasted the whole of this particular post into a website called Quillbot. Maybe you've heard of it, maybe not. After about 20 seconds the onscreen result from their AI detector told me that my article was 100% written by a human. Great. What isn't so great is that I then pasted this self-same article into a website called ZeroGPT and received the result from their AI detector that it was mostly written by a human but a small percentage (about 12% if I remember correctly) had AI involvement. Which website, therefore, should we believe? The answer is neither because each AI generated website that is supposed to accurately detect these things is inaccurate. What one such site can read as AI another site will not detect and vice-versa.

Since I wrote this article earlier today, I have come across the following video on YouTube. It explains about how a book written by a real person was cancelled by a traditional publishing house due to claims that the book was actually written by AI. In particular, watching from 11 minutes and 43 seconds into the video is a bit that I was trying to explain here about not trusting online AI detector programmes.

To me, this video and the content it provides is scary. Scary to me and my written work, scary to other writers who spend a lot of time on their work and scary for readers who don't know what to believe anymore.

Where does that leave us? Thanks to AI muddying just about every water source going on the internet, we are getting to the stage where none of us can believe anything anymore. I can therefore only state with my hand on my heart that yes, I do write everything myself that you read of mine. And I wouldn't want it any other way. As for other writers' work, be it 'naturally aspirated' or AI-created, it is for their own consciences to bear.

If you are satisfied that the written work I offer here is on the level, I would like to think and hope that you will spread the news that "hey, Trev really does write his own stuff!" and provide a link to this blog site. But, please, don't use AI to do this little bit of donkey work for you because it will defeat the object. It's just not natural to do things that way.

Trevor Mulligan