As redundancy caused by artificial intelligence stares in the face of humanity, the first ones to go will be writers. They deserve this fate, along with their readers. Roald Dahl’s short story, The Great Automatic Grammatizator, heralded the end of original writing 70 years ago.
In it, books written by a machine became a roaring success even if some were of poor quality and not ‘respectable’. In the real world, success is all the respect that one needs. The one who wields the power of the pen is not the writer.
The columns belong to celebrities and ‘important people’, with the pieces often written by ‘ghostwriters’ who are banished to a state of non-existence by the powerful. The bylines are fake, and as hollow as the angst the ‘authors’ claim to possess and display like their designer clothes. A visit to the bookstore would further confirm the demise of original writing.
The writers ‘are departed’, and have ‘left no addresses’, to rephrase Eliot. Beneath fancy covers lie words that are cliched, the turns of phrase forced and insufficient to breathe life into dead prose. Even poetry as vers libre is a heap of broken sentences without rhythm or rhyme and indistinguishable from the mass of words littered in the literary purgatory.
Plagiarists continue to thrive and, when caught, claim they were ‘inspired’, while editors reject great books that are sent to them. The final actors in this tragic drama are readers – essentially OTT devotees who somet.