Would I use AI to write my novels? I'd get better results from a monkey with an iPhone | Monica Ali

I asked ChatGPT to improve my latest novel and lost no sleep over the results. But I do worry about diverse voices being crowded out

This summer two worlds - literature and technology - collided. News stories began appearing about authors suing OpenAI and Meta for using their works to train their large language models without consent, without credit and without compensation". I read them with increasing curiosity, and then I found a review of a novella, Death of an Author, which was 95% machine-generated". I put down my quill and stared out of the window, wondering if my tried and tested productivity hacks of taking the dog for a walk or soaking in a hot tub were no longer going to cut it in this frightening new world.

Be brave, I told myself. Experiment with these new technologies or prepare to be replaced by a monkey with an iPhone and a writing app. I lay on my bed and opened up Laika, one of the free creative writing tools I'd read about. Perhaps my latest novel, Love Marriage, could have been vastly improved with this genius tool. I pasted in the first paragraph: In the Ghorami household sex was never mentioned. If the television was on and a kissing-with-tongues scene threatened the chaste and cardamom-scented home, it was swiftly terminated by a flick of the black box. When Yasmin began her first period, her mother had slipped her a pack of Kotex Maxi pads and murmured instructions not to touch the Qur'an ..."

This is an edited extract from Monica Ali's 2023 PEN HG Wells lecture, hosted by English PEN in partnership with New Writing North. The full version of this piece is published in PEN Transmissions, English PEN's literary magazine

Monica Ali is a novelist, whose latest book is Love Marriage