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Malcolm Knox<\/a>Journalist, author and columnist<\/p>\nJune 6, 2026 \u2014 9:30am<\/p>\n
June 6, 2026 \u2014 9:30am<\/p>\n
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Remove items from your saved list<\/a> to add more.<\/p>\n AAA<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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\u2019ve said and turn it into a book \u2013 their book.<\/p>\n At another level, your job can be quite creative. You don\u2019t 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n It\u2019s 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 \u201cghost\u201d.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Related Article 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<\/a>, which also appeared on The Age\u2019s website, on the subject of AI (what else?). Unapologetic, Ellis responded that her article was not written \u201cby\u201d but \u201cwith\u201d AI, \u201cand there\u2019s a really big difference there\u201d.<\/p>\n What exactly is that difference?<\/p>\n Ellis \u201cuploaded 40,000 words of her own original materials into a Copilot Large Language Model (LLM),\u201d a UWS spokesperson said, adding that this was \u201ca sophisticated and appropriate\u201d use of the technology. \u201cThe model summarised her extensive base of knowledge, providing prompts. This was the basis of the early drafts, reflecting Professor Ellis\u2019s own thinking, ideas and opinions built up over more than a decade of dedicated work as a global leader in this field.\u201d<\/p>\n One of 13.6 million Australians who now use AI tools<\/a>, Ellis added, \u201cI think of [AI] very much as a sort of member of my team. I really do feel that it\u2019s allowed me to focus more of my time and energy on what really matters, which is the ideas, the thinking \u2026 rather than spending a lot of my time writing sentences from scratch.\u201d<\/p>\n As a defence, it was more basic but not dissimilar to that offered last month by Olga Tokarczuk<\/a>, a Polish Nobel Prize winner who admitted using AI in writing her fiction. \u201cOften I just ask the machine, \u2018Darling, how could we develop this beautifully?\u2019\u201d Tokarczuk said. \u201cI bought myself the highest, advanced version of one language model, and I can be deeply shocked by how fantastically it expands my horizons and deepens my creative thinking.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cPartnerships\u201d with technology in writing are as old as the typewriter. Past writers have argued that typing, and then word-processing, robbed the writer of a crucial part of their creative process: the slowing-down of thought to the speed of the hand holding a pen. There are manifold ways to create, and technology is not the enemy, although, in defence of the typewriter and the computer, they were not developed, like AI, through stealing the work of writers.<\/p>\n It\u2019s astonishing that novelists like Tokarczuk and teachers like Ellis can skate across the fact that the LLMs they use have been trained through pilfering, without permission or compensation, the work of those writers that the models now threaten to make obsolete. And the commercial outcome of this theft is a direct transfer to some of the most disgustingly wealthy, and disgusting, individuals and corporations on the planet.<\/p>\n But put the piratical creation of LLMs to one side for a moment. AI tools have, and will have, countless beneficial uses. I\u2019m interested in this idea that \u201cwriting sentences from scratch\u201d is a chore that could be eliminated so that the writer can do \u201cwhat really matters, which is the ideas, the thinking\u201d.<\/p>\n Related Article This, to me, is a strange and cynical way to see any kind of thoughtful or creative work, not just writing; that the boring bits can be outsourced to technology, freeing the mind to \u201ccreate\u201d while lounging on a beanbag. It\u2019s distressing to see Nobel laureates or academics teaching students that creativity can be segmented into higher and lower functions, the latter of which are boring, unimportant, redundant, and asking to be eliminated from the process.<\/p>\n Instead, it\u2019s hard to find any creative worker who can contradict the Irish novelist Anne Enright when she said, \u201cI wait for boredom to kick in because boredom, for me, is a very good sign.\u201d The boring bits are the best part of writing. The boring bits allow the mind to wander into unplanned corridors, and the drudgery is when happy accidents happen. The inefficiencies, the dead-ends, the research rabbit-holes and other wastes of time, the battle to \u201cwrite sentences from scratch\u201d, are where the fun is. I can\u2019t put it better than the Booker Prize winner Yann Martel, who, when asked last month if he used AI with his writing, replied, \u201cWhy would you do that? That\u2019s like hiring somebody to have sex for you.\u201d<\/p>\n I can\u2019t say that sitting down for days transcribing someone\u2019s rambling memories is quite like having sex. But while there are numerous fields of human endeavour where eliminating the boring parts is a step forward, writing \u2013 by which I mean writing that you can be proud of, that enriches readers \u2013 just isn\u2019t one of them.<\/p>\n Related Article There is a backlash against the alignment of creativity with efficiency. Companies are looking to employ not the most efficient thinkers but the most original ones. The entrepreneur Mark Cuban told The New York Times\u2019 Maureen Dowd<\/a> that while \u201cAI is going to do a lot of amazing things with drugs and devices and stuff \u2026 humans are humans. Curiosity is the greatest skill you can have in an AI universe.\u201d<\/p>\n Cal Newport, a computer science professor, said that humanities students, steeped in digressive, meandering, inefficient thinking, who \u201care reading hard books and are still writing have built these brain circuits, and they\u2019re comfortable with cognitive strain. These are the people with real value if everyone else has fried their brains.\u201d<\/p>\n Tokarczuk herself had a rethink about using her \u201cdarling\u201d AI to help write her fiction, and reportedly put it back on the shelf. In creative work, most shortcuts are fool\u2019s gold.<\/p>\n Did it make any difference to the readers of those ghosted books that I put myself through the boring part of the process? I hope so, but I don\u2019t know. It was unproductive and uneconomic, but frankly, even if it didn\u2019t add one dollar to the final bottom line, I don\u2019t care. The human connection is all you retain in the end, long after the work has been done. Without the human inefficiencies, Yann Martel is right: all you\u2019re doing is paying a machine to have your pleasure for you.<\/p>\n Malcolm Knox is a journalist, author and regular columnist.<\/p>\n Save<\/p>\n You have reached your maximum number of saved items.<\/p>\n Remove items from your saved list<\/a> to add more.<\/p>\n![\"Illustration](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/64f4d2469b7d0ff4f19823a9c041ad82a5be4489.jpeg\")
Illustration by Dionne Gain<\/p>\n![\"Western](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/b88518414ff64ad15cfe756603433199960a6005.jpeg\")
<\/a><\/p>\n![\"Polish](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/95c69a00694b35539aed6395c976ca7ec8b85987.jpeg\")
Polish author Olga Tokarczuk in London after winning the Man Booker International prize in 2018 for her book Flights. Matt Crossick\/\/PA via AP<\/p>\n![\"Data](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/63197eee9e95ebbe1b5ebd8db0123fc76e99bef1.jpeg\")
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