Page against the machine.
It’s 9 p.m. on a weeknight and, like many stumped aspiring fiction writers, I’m using ChatGPT to pen a sci-fi short story. The premise? Survivors fleeing an Earth that’s been rendered a post-apocalyptic hellscape by AI data centers, nuclear war, and environmental degradation.
They escape to a parallel planet free of death and strife, only to discover that this so-called utopia is a place where life no longer has meaning. This might sound high-concept, but it’s a cakewalk for my cyberscribe, which churned out a vivid, 8,000-word short titled “The Better World” in just hours with only a few revisions.
In one surprisingly poignant passage, a refugee named Mara reflects on her deceased dad while gazing upon the dying Earth from space: “Now the ship was rising and there was no one left on Earth who could remember the sound of his laugh.”
Philip K. Dick, eat your heart out.
He’s a writing machine
AI-assisted books are seeing a boom time, but their proliferation has spawned a literary backlash, with even authors who deny using the tech getting caught in the crossfire. This summer, first-time novelist Jerry Falade had his staggering $2 million book deal cancelled by his agents under suspicions of AI use — allegations he vehemently denied.
My manuscript muse is Tim Boucher, a prolific author from Quebec, Canada, who has penned 125 books in a year — roughly two per week — with the help of ChatGPT, Claude and other large language models.
Some of these, available in E-book form, ranging from $1.99 to $4.99 online, were created and published in just a few hours.
Boucher devised these cyborg works, which contain between 2,000 and 5,000 words and as many as 250 images, as a somewhat Meta commentary on tech and society, like an Andy Warhol of authorship.
For Boucher, the goal isn’t just to produce best-selling literature at lightspeed — the endeavor has collectively earned him only a few “low thousands,” he claims — but to experiment with what storytelling can be.
“I’m not just trying to replace a faster way to do genre fiction,” he told The Post. “I do the project that I find the most interesting given what’s available.”
Not knowing what passages are machine-made is part of the fun.
“On the back, there are two stickers: one says artificial intelligence and one says organic intelligence,” said the Quebecer, adding that he doesn’t disclose “which part is which.”
Despite his transparency, Boucher faced backlash from social media users and even authors like Pulitzer-winner Michael Chabon, who believe AI books are destroying literary integrity.
“There were 48 or 72 hours where it was just people swearing at me nonstop and saying really hostile things,” said the Canuck, describing the reaction after confessing to his controversial hobby in 2023.
Boucher claims that derivative writing long predates Chatbots, declaring, “I didn’t invent unoriginal art in writing. People have been doing human slop for forever.”
Is the pen mightier than Claude?
Ethics notwithstanding, artificially enhanced works are viewed as a threat to human authors.
A recent study of 14,419 self-published genre-fiction books sold on Amazon between 2023 and 2026 found that 20% contained substantial swathes of AI-generated text, including nearly 1,000 where over 90% of the prose was flagged as AI-generated.
Automating authorship can prove lucrative. While Boucher claims his tech-experimental works are currently more of a side hustle, one unidentified author generated an estimated $1.7 million in sales from eight AI-infused books in a single year, according to a September MIT study.
Unlike Boucher’s disclosed books, many of these technological tomes are deliberate ripoffs of authors’ existing works, designed to hornswoggle unsuspecting customers, often mimicking the titles, author names or content of existing works
“A lot of books that are on Amazon are, we call them scammy books or zombie knockoffs,” Mary Rasenberger, CEO of the NYC-based Author’s Guild, told The Post. “They’re deliberately intended to steal sales from a particular book.”
Rasenberger says these literary impostors can exhibit telltale signs, including flowery prose that “makes no sense,” writing that begins coherently but devolves into a “jumble,” and passages that repeat or contradict themselves.
Rasenberger lamented that robo-slop is “drowning the marketplace” and making it “harder to find the good human-written books.”
To protect customers from unwittingly buying AI-heavy books, the Author’s Guild is lobbying for laws requiring publishers and online retailers to be more transparent about AI use.
The Author’s Guild has even taken legal action against major AI firms such as Anthropic for using copyrighted books to train their models without the author’s permission, notably introducing contract publishing clauses that force them to get permission, and proposing that consenting authors receive up to 90% of the training licensing revenue.
“We think it’s so important to have labeling so that readers can distinguish and total transparency around how much you’re using,” said Rasenberger. “It’s one thing to use AI to research. But did AI create the characters? Who wrote the text? How much of the text?”
Not the a-slop-calypse
Boucher, for one, doesn’t believe that using the instrument invalidates its authenticity.
“I’m still executing my creative vision, but that’s no longer art because I incorporated an out-of-bounds tool,” he snarked.
Not to mention that using AI requires plenty of creativity or hard work, per Boucher, who’s been honing his process since 2022.
Instead of copy-pasting prompts into ChatGPT, the Canuck begins with a title and a brief written concept, and then often uses image generators like Stable Diffusion or Midjourney to storyboard his world.
He then enlists Chatbots to flesh out characters and storylines, generating passages in chunks, editing them by hand and running them back through AI until satisfied.
“I see the creative act as something that’s happening a step or two back,” he said. “It’s the selection, the arrangement, the prompting, the editing, the original inputs that are human.”
Contrary to fears that AI reliance causes mental atrophy, Boucher said his process has made him a “better writer” by teaching him structure and prose he might not have stumbled upon on his own.
Machine learning
But could AI actually improve my writing, or is it just the high-tech equivalent of getting someone else to do your homework?
I put Boucher’s methodology to the test via an abridged experiment without the illustrations or E-book assembly.
For someone technologically illiterate, the programming side already felt like a “Good Will Hunting” math problem. It began with uploading files named manuscript-generation.md, gated-manuscript-generation.md and namer.md, which establish the writing protocols and conventions for naming characters, places and other fictional elements.
My spartan prompt called for a 5,000-word story about people fleeing a dystopian planet to some far-flung Valhalla light-years ahead in science and everything else, only to find that life has no meaning because everything from plants to people is renewable — or so they think.
With several revisions only a few lines long, the AI collaborator eventually turned this vague premise into a 14-course-meal.
The protagonist, Mara, is an orphan living among 38 refugees in a ship’s hull, scavenging animals for food and burning computer parts for warmth.
Among them is Elias, a self-proclaimed Messiah who promises salvation in a place called the “Better World,” where rivers run clean and people “enter hospitals and leave well.”
A silver craft, piloted by Rusk, a distinctly disinterested green alien, ferries them to an “Avatar”-esque Elysium of pristine forests and translucent, multi-legged creatures.
Housing, food and medical care are free: “the machines make plenty.” Animals, plants and even loudspeakers repair themselves almost instantly, freeing residents to litter with abandon and fly through the trees without a care.
The society’s darker logic comes into focus when its leader, interrupted mid-speech, vaporizes the offender with a ray gun. The victim promptly rematerializes and complains.
“They have abolished death,” Elias whispers. “They’ve abolished the objection to killing,” Mara replies.
Judgment day
Bringing my novella to life took a few drafts. I wanted Earth to be more dystopian and death-filled to give the refugees emotional incentive and have them be enamored with the “Better World” before noticing the cracks.
I also found it a bit derivative — a Frankenstein quilt of “Planet of the Apes,” “Terminator,” and “Idiocracy” — but then again so was my premise.
My GPT collaborator did produce some amazing turns of phrase, notably describing the view of the dying Earth from space as resembling “burnt cloth embroidered with fires.”
But for every profound statement, there was a passage overstuffed with descriptors, perhaps overwhelmed by my parameters and input.
For Rasenberger, AI writing will never approximate its creators’ counterpart as it doesn’t experience “the human condition.”
“I think sometimes these AI developers confuse, they think that our brains are just like computers, and that part of our brain does that kind of stuff,” she said. “But a lot of the way humans relate to the world is through our senses and through our emotions.”
She added, “AI can try to mimic that, but it’s never going to have that soul.”
For me, the cardinal sin of farming out writing to AI was sacrificing the “writer’s block” I found so essential to the creative process. I believe the struggle to formulate words is how you sharpen swords and how diamonds are formed under pressure.
Would I end up like the aliens in a “Better World,” becoming dumber and more callous as technology advances?
Coincidentally, a 2025 MIT study found that excessive use of ChatGPT for writing can negatively impact cognition and critical thinking, although — echoing Boucher’s point — hybrid usage could potentially prove beneficial as well.
Boucher sees a future where human writers will become “obsolete” for certain kinds of casual reading where entertainment and information are enough, but not for other art forms that society holds to a “different standard.”
“I come up with a cool product that fits into my world and people are interested in it and they like it and they buy it, how wrong is it?” He said. “I think we have to evaluate what each of these things is.”
Ultimately, it would seem that AI scribes work best when treated as a tool, not a crutch.
My mechanical muse even appeared to sound the alarm on AI overreliance in this shockingly self-aware passage from “A Better World” while describing the destruction of Mara’s home planet.
“There had been a time when the computers were said to be thinking on humanity’s behalf. Their owners cleared whole forests to build more of them, dammed rivers to cool them, and buried towns under the transmission lines. Every year the machines promised to use less power for each thought….When the power grids finally failed, the computers continued to consume what they could, running on private reactors and the last of the rivers. The people who had ordered them built had already gone somewhere else.”
