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Eithne Shortall: The writing’s on the wall in the terrifying tale of AI ‘writers’ versus humans

With ChatGPT and other generative AI becoming increasingly sophisticated, writers now face their works being swallowed whole, chewed up and spat out by the software as eerily familiar stories

‘I firmly believe people have no interest in purchasing AI-generated books, but there is currently no onus to disclose when a novel is created in this way'

I first saw ChatGPT in action in a pub last December. The artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot, which can generate human-like text in a matter of seconds, had recently launched and was in the news, largely over universities fearing students would use the technology to generate essays.

A friend of mine produced his phone and opened the programme. He typed in, “Write a short story about a group of college friends who meet up for Christmas ...