Woke up stuffed up with hay fever. In a grumpy mood, and computer things are trying to take over my life. Sounds like a line spoken by a character who wears a tin foil headpiece and thinks Area 51 is listening in, but it’s actually spoken by me every time I turn on my laptop. First of all, my anti-virus protection software thing acts more like a virus than a virus does. No matter how many times I go to settings and disable notifications it finds a way of popping up another notification about something I’m not interested in. ‘Your AVG Secure VPN is active, secure your settings.’ [Changes settings to turn off my VPN unless I say it can be turned on.] ‘Your AVG Secure VPN is inactive, activate it here. [Turns off notifications for this product.] ‘Your AVG Secure VPN notifications have been turned off. Turn them on here. [Gives up and moves on.] And breathe.
‘Let Co-Pilot help you…’ What? Who’s… What is this fresh hell? Microsoft’s new Co-pilot, ‘Let AI do your living for you.’ No thank you. I’m going to write now, so I open Word and my file explorer so I can find the last chapter and have a re-read. ‘Let Co-Pilot find your last chapter for you.’ No! I’m quite capable. Quite capable of searching out the Co-Pilot button and switching it off. (Sometimes it’s not hyphenated, as in, Copilot, and it looks like it’s saying copulate, or is that just me?)
‘Your Copulate has been switched off. You can turn it on…’ No.
And so, to work, but first, a quick check on Facebook in case there are any free advertising opportunities.
Well, there are plenty of adverts. ‘Sell your book with AI.’ ‘Let AI live your life for you.’ ‘Write a book with AI.’
WTF? (Stands for What the Faulkner?) That last one is a definite no. I mean, how insulting can a machine be? How may times have I seen an advertisement for some book-writing AI software? It’s everywhere and it’s foul. It’s like saying, ‘Hi, you want to have a baby? Let AI do that for you with Microsoft’s Copulate, it’ll even bring it up for you so you can get on with the housework and Martini mixing.’ Write and publish a book in a day with AI…’ No. Just no. I’d rather spend over 500 hours doing it myself while AI sees to my household chores, exercise and tax bill, but can it do that? Can it buffalo.
Here’s something you can all do for us impoverished writers who now have to contend not only with the prejudice of not having a ‘real’ publisher, but also with computers that will write books for imbeciles, the lazy and the talentless until the whole world is dumbed down to the level of Trumpery. When you see an advertisement on social media saying something like, ‘Let AI write a book for you’, do what I do, and report it as offensive, because, frankly, it is.
Anyway, on that wrong side of the bed note, I shall now get on with chapter 11 without the use of AI, Co-pilot or anything else that is designed to take the living out of life. Oh, hang on, there’s an AVG notification to swat first… Oh look, a laughing dove…
