AI: Artificial Intelligence, or Apathetic Input?

The joy is in the challenge

What Paul Sheldon and I used back in the day ( Photo by jules a. on Unsplash)

At the start of the 1990 film Misery, author Paul Sheldon, played by James Caan, types the closing sentences of his latest novel. He marks the occasion of the book’s completion with a small ritual: a cigarette and a glass of champagne.

I’ve never written a novel, and I don’t smoke, so I shan’t be performing a similar ritual any time soon. But that doesn’t mean I don’t get great satisfaction from completing a writing project, be it an article for an online platform, a letter to a newspaper, or a short story to submit to a competition. To get from blank page to final full stop can be challenging, frustrating or both, but that is where I’m at home.

The Dirty End of the Field

I thrive on the challenges thrown down by difficult assignments. Scouring the Internet for verification of an obscure fact, and being mired in a thesaurus looking for the exact word, are what makes this writer’s heart go all aflutter. To use another movie link, as King Benny (Vittorio Gassman), the ageing gangster said in the 1996 film Sleepers, “We’re in the dirty end of the field now. That’s where I play, and I play alone.” That’s me all right.

So when I read posts about and, with increasing regularity, see ads on my feed that…