I’m seventeen chapters into Gilded Treason, having finished an outline of 951 years of Gyran History of Gyre.  Drinith and her companions arrive in Gyre in 948, the events of Greater Evil occur in 949 and Gilded Treason takes place in 950. (The apparent discrepancy a keen reader might notice is due to the Gyran calendar having a zeroth year.) 

I’m busy ignoring all the hype about AI and chatbots. Its visual equivalents looked impressive to me at first, but their images come across as cut from the same cloth, almost if they are done by one artist with the same strengths and weaknesses (which, I suppose, they are). I’m sure at some stage AI-written books will become best sellers and win awards. I’m certain more commercially minded authors are experimenting with it already to relieve some of the dreary business of writing. Already some short story magazines have had to stop accepting unsolicited manuscripts due to the amount of AI spam pouring into their submissions systems. And I guarantee within six months to a year, I won’t be able to watch anything on Youtube without being besieged by ads about how I can make millions writing with AI. Can AI ultimately fake human experience on the page? For many readers (and I include myself among them), possibly. There are a lot of books out there and a lot of keen observations of human life, a lot of fine prose. I read old science fiction and down through the years more modern stuff I thought to be new and fresh and revelatory turned out to have been done in some fashion already fifty or sixty years ago. Simply put, original writing is subjective. It only has to be original to the reader. I could easily read something by an AI and think it thoroughly original simply because I haven’t come across it before. There’s not some supreme observer keeping score on what is new and what has been done before.

Of course, there is a way to do this in a fair and objective fashion. If we programmed an AI…

[P.S. I didn’t use a chatbot to write this. I’m a 100% organic writer. :)]