NOTE: The word ai is deliberately written in lowercase. I refuse to give ai the capitalization it demands.
It started with a bet.
My husband and I were sitting at the kitchen table, arguing about ai (as one does in 2026), and he was convinced all the hype was just that: hype. “Sure, it can write an email,” he said, “but it can’t write a BOOK.” I disagreed. Loudly. And in good married-couple fashion, we decided the only way to settle it was… A BET!
The rules were simple. One prompt. No editing, no rewriting, no going back and forth with it to make it better. Just me, ChatGPT and one sentence:
“Write me a 300–400 page book about ai taking over the world.”
Yes, I asked a machine to write a book about machines taking over the world. I do see the irony. I chose it on purpose.
And guess what? It did it! Chapters, characters, a plot, a beginning, a middle and an end. Was it good? I honestly don’t know, I only read the first chapter, and it seemed ok, but was it a book? Technically… yes. So I slapped a cover on it, ai rendered, no doubt, uploaded it to Amazon, and within 48 hours, my “novel” was up for sale for anyone in the world to buy.
I won the bet. But I don’t feel like I’ve won anything. As a matter of fact, it feels like I lost some of my humanity in the process. I haven’t even shown the listing to my husband yet. And I don’t think I will.
Because it was EASY. Way too easy. Nobody checked if it was any good. Nobody stopped me. It just sat there, on the same virtual shelf as books people poured years of their lives into, with a shiny “Buy Now” button underneath.
Anybody can do this. And that’s the problem.
I’ve been in the publishing business for a long time. I’ve worked with local writers who spend months, sometimes years, getting their stories down on paper. We’ve interviewed many of them, here at the Seeker. They are dedicated. They write before work, after the kids go to bed, on weekends when everyone else is at the beach. They rewrite. They get rejected. They doubt themselves. They rewrite again. And when they finally hold that book in their hands, it means something, because a piece of them is in there.
Now picture that writer trying to get noticed on Amazon, while someone else is pumping out a “book” a day with one sentence and a free afternoon. Who do you think wins that race? And what do you think the algorithm pushes, unless you pay? It’s not the better book. It’s the author with more titles, more listings and more chances to pop up in a search. Real authors aren’t losing because their work isn’t good. They’re losing because they’re outnumbered. And because the algorithm is rigged.
When I uploaded my book, I was asked whether ai was involved. I answered honestly. But as far as I could tell, that answer went to Amazon, not to the readers. Someone browsing MY listing knows I didn’t write a single word of it, because my prologue says it, but what about other books? Nothing there is prominently stating that it’s ai written. You think you’re buying somebody’s imagination, somebody’s experience, somebody’s voice. You’re not. You’re buying whatever a computer spat out in a minutes. I believe you deserve to know that before you pull out your credit card.
If I could do this for a laugh at my kitchen table, can you imagine what someone can do when it’s their whole business model? Knock-offs of popular books. Fake “companion guides” riding on somebody else’s bestseller. Titles published under names that look an awful lot like real authors.
I typed ONE prompt. ChatGPT did the rest. In a lot of places, copyright is meant to protect human work, not something a computer produced on its own. So who owns the rights? Not me… Not Amazon… Not the writers whose work the machine stole to produce my book either.
I’ve written before about the ai slop flooding our Facebook feeds. That was one thing. It’s another thing to watch my own one-sentence experiment go live faster than your Amazon order shows up on the porch.
And all this is not limited to writing. I can tell you how many city council candidates have been using ai in their marketing material, be it graphic, text or video. Kudos to those who have hired real people.
Recently, a friend of mine started building websites with ai. He showed me a site he’d done and I was floored. I had been using ai to help me spot mistakes in programming code before, but this? This was next level.
It did what I spent my entire career perfecting and produced a result (and I can’t lie about this, as much as I want to) a hundred time better than anything I have EVER done, in a few seconds. And I felt absolutely obsolete, not to mention obligated to hop on that ai train for fear of getting left at the station. How can I compete with that? I simply can’t.
I’m not anti-ai. I use it. It’s a great tool to brainstorm, organize your thoughts or get past a blank page. It helps me with sentence structure and orthograph. I like to believe it made me a better writer, but I feel there is a big difference between a writer using ai as a tool, and a computer writing the whole thing while someone slaps their name on the cover and calls themselves an author. Bro! You’re not an author…
Then, if you follow the news, there’s been pretty scary warnings coming out over the last few weeks.
So what do we do about it? Or can we do anything about it probably is the better question… When the President of the United States calls ai safety warnings a ‘sick conspiracy’, well, it seems like a lost cause. Until platforms clearly and prominently label everything that is mostly or entirely ai generated we can only do our due diligence. On Amazon, look up the author, check how many books they’ve released and how fast, and buy from writers you can actually find, meet and talk to. Better yet, go to a local book signing. We have plenty of talented authors right here in Cornwall and SDG&A, and I promise you, every one of them wrote their own books.
I won the bet. But a book about ai taking over the world, written by ai, published in two days and sold to people who had no idea it was made by ai got produced in the process.
Maybe it wasn’t fiction after all.
What do you think? I welcome your comments!
I am posting the link to the book not so you will buy it, but so you can judge for yourself and read the first few chapters. Would you know it’s ai by reading it?
About the Author
This is a great read, Julia. AI has helped me in my work too, and I have worried about how this may have affected the quality of my work or the amount of critical analysis I’ve brought to the table. Thanks for sharing so honestly.
This is a great article thank you