This week, Broadstairs writer and KentOnline columnist Melissa Todd considers the impact of AI on our lives - and why it can never replicate our creativity, empathy or innate humanity.

This year I’m taking a writing course - not before time, the wags among you might suggest - and was appalled to hear a couple of my classmates claim they run their creative writing submissions through ChatGPT before letting anyone else see them. Worse, they were depressed to find their ideas were superior when reframed by a computer! Imagine spending £4,000 on a course only to discover an inanimate object can do it better than you in a millisecond.

So, heart hammering, I sent my own words whirring through the software.

ChatGPT made them much worse. Thank the good God. They were more perfect, perhaps, but less human. And human is surely all we seek in art. Art widens the borders around our humanity. It expands our empathy, deepens our experience. I think I needn’t fear ChatGPT will replace me quite yet.

What is AI? It’s a way of using data to make decisions independent of humans - to spot patterns, identify images, respond in an intelligent way to the world. It seeks to replicate centuries of human achievement through profoundly inhuman means. The use of the word ‘intelligence’ in artificial intelligence is unfortunate, I think. There are so many different kinds of intelligence. And human intelligence is so much more than data. For instance: I’m writing this on a train, a train I can recognise is packed with humans. A machine would need to consult a trillion images that constitute a training set to come to the same conclusion. It would recognise human eyes, legs and guts, but wouldn't imagine what those humans were thinking, nor wonder about their lives, nor be bothered by their smell. Intelligence isn’t merely a resource, like oil: it’s also that certain feeling in the pit of your stomach, knowing how to behave in particular situations: being aware that a woman on the adjacent seat smells, but also knowing not to mention it, but instead delicately wave one’s perfumed wrist near one’s nose while looking elsewhere.

Tasks that are horribly difficult for us - long division, processing large amounts of data - are easy for AI; but, conversely, many of our instinctive behaviours - doing a happy dance when you get good news: playing with a dog, then giving it a treat for being a good boy - are way beyond a computer. These behaviours are too bound up in biology and sociology to be meaningful or explicable to machines. To be human is to be a cultural, social, linguistic creation. Currently, AI can only take over the least interesting parts of our lives.

Which is just as well, for AI isn’t neutral. As with guns and other weapons, it amplifies human intent, good or bad. The English language dominates its data sets, marginalising other cultures. It’s already enabling exploitation - some U.S. hospitals reportedly monitor workers’ finances, their bank balances and credit card statements, to adjust their pay offers accordingly, choosing to offer the desperate less. Amazon had to scrap an AI recruitment programme when they realised it was favouring men over women.

We may one day vote to limit AI’s reach - excluding it from nuclear decisions, gene editing, or autonomous weapons - but for now, it’s reshaping our world unchecked. And we have no idea yet how this technology might impact our lives. The aesthetic philosopher Paul Virilio points out that to invent the ship is also to invent the shipwreck; to invent electricity is also to invent electrocution. As humans we have a tendency to be wise after the event. But once terrible things happen, our ability to reflect on them and take measures to prevent their happening again tends to be fairly robust over time.

What does this mean for the writer? To cut down on the tremendous AI generation of terrible books by writers-turned-machine operators, Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing has now implemented a limit on the number of books the same person can upload to sell: only three per day. Three! A day! My fourth book, Gag Writer, will come out this year. Each book represents a solid year of graft, every word carefully weighed and selected, by me, not a machine: the process takes flipping forever. But I love it. Even when I hate it, I love it. And when it’s going well I enter an ecstatic state of flow in which whole days pass like dreams and I find at the end I’ve made something that delights me.

What have you got to say to the world? What words would you like to be your lasting legacy? What question are you posing to the universe? AI can’t help you here. Your story, the way you tell it, remains uniquely human and deeply personal. I don’t despair. I keep writing. Because I must.