I’m furious, all the time.

I’ve never wanted to be rich.

Oh, sure, I’ve daydreamed about owning a massive, fuck-off house and floating about writing novels when I can spare the time between social occasions with my equally moneyed friends, but that’s not an actual goal. Partly because I don’t want moneyed friends, I want my friends, I just want them to have a shit tonne of money too - and I know me, and I know my friends, and every single one of us would be ridiculously generous to people we love and to charities we think are deserving that we wouldn’t end up with enough money to afford the upkeep on that massive, fuck-off house, anyway.

Like, my best friend and I have a long-running castles-in-the-sky plan to buy an ex-B&B somewhere like Scarborough (we love the ocean and also British coastal towns are often very deprived) and just fill it with homeless teenagers and foster cats. Which, as hobbies go, sounds expensive.

Anyway, I’ve got exactly zero chance of ever BECOMING rich, haven’t I, because I decided to dedicate my life to writing genre fiction instead of going into finance, and these days only a sliver of the population read anymore, and even the ones that do are utterly spoiled for choice, so the odds of MY books being picked out and held up as worthy of money-generating things like foreign rights deals and TV options are so slim that I don’t even really think about it.

Which sucks for me, kind of, except luckily I’ve got a day job that keeps the lights on. Handily, I really like my day job, which is just as well, really.

But it also sucks for future generations of writers. And I know that’s a wildly grandiose statement - I am not pretending to be some kind of revolutionary, generational voice. I write about teenagers getting into scrapes, after all. But I have a long-held ambition to start a charity that supports young writers and would-be writers, in which I could afford to pay the REAL revolutionary, generational voices to work with kids in workshops etc. And I don’t know the First Thing about starting or running a charity, let alone fundraising, and also the charity sector is ALSO massively oversubscribed because as a society we still rely on charities for all kinds of things that really I think should just be a given, like… making sure people have enough to eat?! Somewhere safe to sleep?! So like, there’s very little space for cultural initiatives. But if I was stupidly rich I could fund it myself, and I WANT to.

So, that makes me furious.

Do you know what else makes me furious? Fucking AI. What a surprise, right?

I’m furious LLM-developing companies stole my IP. I’m furious they’re trying to take over the creative industries because it’s more glamorous than actually fixing the world so they can get more shiny hedge fund pennies than they could if they were curing cancer or automating dangerous mining jobs. I’m furious that SO MANY PEOPLE seem to utterly fucking entranced by the Fake Creativity Plagiarism Machine, even in light of what the data centre behemoths are doing to the planet and local communities where they’re being built.

And I say that knowing damn well that there are people in my life who ‘just use it for this…’ or ‘just use it for that…’ and I am not going to cut those people off. Like, MY ethical imperative is that I want to avoid it as much as I possibly can, in the same way a vegan will avoid animal products. Those people can do what they like, and it’s my personal decision not to join them. My only hope is that they don’t end up regretting it if they outsource too much of their life to the machine so they can’t cope when OpenAI starts charging out the wazoo for “tokens”.

Under my personal code, it will NEVER be truly ethical to use one of these models, given how they were trained. It will NEVER be ethical to use these models, given the impact and lack of oversight and regulation. It will NEVER be ethical to use these models considering the security flaws that could see all your conversations with Chat sold on the dark web.

But - not all the decisions we make in life ARE ethical. I eat meat. I bought a pair of sunglasses off TikTok shop last week because I’ve never seen anywhere else sell lenses that fit over my normal glasses and that fixes a problem in my life. So, no, I don’t want to use AI to plan my holiday itinerary, because with just a teensy bit of extra effort I can do that myself and not burn a hole through a Texas water supply while I do it, but I’m not angry with the individual users who choose to do that. I can even understand it when it’s about streamlining deathly brain-numbing life admin. I’m significantly more angry with the soulless corporate overlords who consistently override existing laws without so much as an ‘oops’ to make this shit exist, and with our jelly-spined governments who are too afraid of losing all that lovely billionaire money to put proper regulations in place to PROTECT THEIR FUCKING CITIZENS.

I do, however, get mad when you’ve got globally lauded authors admitting they use it, in the same breath that they decry losing the world of creativity as it used to be, despite ACTIVELY making decisions to destroy the way it used to be! That is utterly disgusting and I cannot respect and author who uses AI in their process - I just cannot.

Sure, there were always going to be grifters using AI to write reverse harem monster smut, because grifters don’t have any fucking respect for the readers of reverse harem monster smut, so they think they can get away with it and make a shit tonne of money in the process. But actually, every reverse harem monster smut afficionado I’ve ever met cares deeply about the character development of the books they read, and frankly it takes more than churning out 50,000 AI-generated fever dreams to make a quick buck; you have to pay for marketing and pray the reviews aren’t just utterly miserable and eventually those grifters will realise there are significantly easier ways to grift and they’ll do that instead. But for award winning, literary masters to be doing this shit too? It’s depressing. It’s ENRAGING.

Almost as enraging as the fact that publishing as a business is inching closer to the fucking Singularity with every wild, LLM-based business decision they’re making too. Oh, there’s an LLM that can read my manuscript and sift through the tidal wave of submissions and agent or commissioning editor might receive? No, there fucking isn’t, because if I find out someone’s done that to one of my books they’re getting publicly named and shamed. Because guess what? I HAVE A DAY JOB. I want my stories out in the world, but I’m not relying on publishing to make my life financially viable. That gives me a kind of power, and it’s a kind of power I am so grateful for right now.

I am angry that people can’t pay their bills.

I’m angry kids don’t have enough to eat, and there are still a bunch of whiny arseholes complaining about free school meals.

I’m angry that our society is doings its fucking damnedest to strip away whatever semblance of humanity and creativity and soul we have left, determined to turn us all into polite, subservient automata in service of the elite. You know they’ve been trying to do that since the dawn of Feudalism, right? Why are we letting them?

I do not want to read AI-generated books. I do not want to watch AI-generated films, I don’t want to listen to AI-generated music and I don’t want to play AI-generated games. I don’t want AI to do my day job and I don’t want AI to read my emails or write my wedding vows or touch on my life in any way at all. At this stage in the game, I don’t even want it doing my laundry - no doubt it would only “hallucinate” the genius idea to pour both vinegar and bleach into the detergent trays at the same time and kill me off with home-brewed chlorine gas.

What am I even meant to do with this anger? With this gelatinous rage that oozes through my body like it’s on its own sticky, tide-rigged course?

Well, obviously, I’m going to write. I’m going to write the angriest stories you’ve ever read, but you might not even realise that’s what’s powering them. As the wise saying goes, I do all things through spite, which fuels me (and it might as well, because writing isn’t giving me enough money to buy food to fuel me, that’s for sure).

I’m also going to support as much bizarre, lo-fi, utterly human art as I can lay my grabby hands on. Because that’s how we stay human, and more than anything else right now I feel like we need to be doing everything we possibly can to stay human, rather than morphing into clockwork automata in some rich guy’s theatre of the perfect, subservient town.