Things I’d never outsource to a robot: sex and the joy of writing

In several previous lives, I was other people: soldiers, footballers and a football coach, an accused murderer, a racehorse trainer, a crusading mother and father, and a few cricketers.

As a ghostwriter of celebrity memoirs, at one level your job is functional. You sit down with the subject. They talk, you record. You type what they’ve said and turn it into a book – their book.

At another level, your job can be quite creative. You don’t just listen to them; you inhabit and re-imagine them. A story is more than just a sackful of words. It can be uncanny to live inside someone else’s head, and for them to collaborate in their own impersonation. The more effort you put into getting their voice right, the better your chances of building a close relationship and a memorable experience.

It’s inefficient to type out dozens of hours of recordings. I could have outsourced that to transcription services or, later, artificial intelligence. But for all the inefficiency, I felt that by listening to them over and over, by some magic of osmosis I could truly be their “ghost”.

So when I see writers using AI to increase their efficiency, as if writing were an assembly line of mechanical functions, I feel sorry for them.

This week, it emerged that the Western Sydney University pro vice-chancellor Cath Ellis used AI in writing an opinion piece in The Sydney Morning Herald, which also appeared on The Age’s website, on the subject of AI (what else?). Unapologetic, Ellis responded that her article was not written “by” but “with” AI, “and there’s a really big difference there”.

Ellis “uploaded 40,000 words of her own original materials into a Copilot Large Language Model (LLM),” a UWS spokesperson said, adding that this was “a sophisticated and appropriate” use of the technology. “The model summarised her extensive base of knowledge, providing prompts. This was the basis of the early drafts, reflecting Professor Ellis’s own thinking, ideas and opinions built up over more than a decade of dedicated work as a global leader in this field.”

One of 13.6 million Australians who now use AI tools, Ellis added, “I think of [AI] very much as a sort of member of my team. I really do feel that it’s allowed me to focus more of my time and energy on what really matters, which is the ideas, the thinking … rather than spending a lot of my time writing sentences from scratch.”

As a defence, it was more basic but not dissimilar to that offered last month by Olga Tokarczuk, a Polish Nobel Prize winner who admitted using AI in writing her fiction. “Often I just ask the machine, ‘Darling,