Here’s his story:

This week I was replaced by AI. I saw it coming, but it didn’t make the news any easier to deal with. To be honest, it terrifies me for the future of our species. If that sounds a bit over the top, hear me out.

I am a writer. Not only that, I am a commercially successful one. Although you probably haven’t heard of me, I’ve published more than 300 short stories in women’s magazines over the past 15 years. From ghost stories in Woman’s Weekly to tales of romance in Take a Break Fiction Feast, I write them all. Sorry – wrote.

‘Dear Geoff,’ the email said. ‘Going forward, our in-house team will be using AI tools to compile future editions, but we thank you for your many contributions to the magazine over the years. Kind regards, Rebecca.’ Or to put it more bluntly: ‘We’ve replaced you with a robot.’

“AI has taken my job,” July 21, 2026

He goes on to admit that, while he was a good craftsman, the stories he wrote were what some of us would call potboilers.

A couple of thoughts here: Bagwell’s story may be more complex than the telling. And the editors could be making a big mistake. People who dump seasoned staff for AI often are.

Alternatively, consider this

The editors may have decided to reduce or sideline fiction because interest is tapering off. Just for example, the big Harlequin romance producer is investing in AI micromovies. These may end up largely replacing light romantic fiction as a genre, the way TV drama replaced radio drama.

Bagwell is not totally surprised; he himself had used ChatGPT to write a poem about his deceased dad and to write a 700-word humorous romance which, in his view, was “funny and as good as any I have ever written or read”. That said,

The unavoidable consequence of ever-improving AI is nothing less than the end of all human creativity. Why? Because whether it’s a novel or a rock song, a portrait or a poem, who is going to spend the years of study and practice required to produce something that can be churned out by a computer in seconds? Even if an artist doesn’t use AI, who is going to believe them? If an unknown author writes the next One Hundred Years of Solitude, how will we know AI didn’t help? A young singer-songwriter is hailed as the new Bob Dylan? Maybe he just selected the ‘Dylan’ option on the songwriting app. In a world where music, art and literature can be made by machine, everyone will assume it was made by machine.

“AI has taken my job“

But now, let’s step back a minute…

First, the idea is not as new as people think. George Orwell (1903–1950) saw it coming nearly a century ago. In Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), Julia, the principal female character, has a job minding the novel-writing machine that churns out potboilers for the Party’s printing presses:

Julia was twenty-six years old… and she worked, as he had guessed, on the novel-writing machines in the Fiction Department. She enjoyed her work, which consisted chiefly in running and servicing a powerful but tricky electric motor… She could describe the whole process of composing a novel, from the general directive issued by the Planning Committee down to the final touching-up by the Rewrite Squad. But she was not interested in the final product. She “didn’t much care for reading,” she said. Books were just a commodity that had to be produced, like jam or bootlaces.

The chatbot scarfing up hundreds of millions of words from a variety of sources — legally or otherwise — is a much more elegant technology than Julie knew, and probably much faster. But it amounts to the same thing. And a way of automating that sort of writing was, as Orwell foresaw, inevitable.

But here’s a question: Could a novel-writing machine or a chatbot have produced Nineteen Eighty-Four? I don’t think so. The novel could only have been produced by someone who, due to his life experience, had an intimate and unusual knowledge of how totalitarians think. Someone who understood, for example, that O’Brien was not trying to force Winston to say that 2 + 2 = 5 but to actually believe it, if the Party says so. And by the time he is thoroughly broken, Winston really does love Big Brother too.

Now, if five hundred authors produced potboilers along the lines of Nineteen Eighty-Four, a chatbot could doubtless produce #501. It might be an improvement on many of them. However, realistically, while Orwell’s classic helped shape our language, it was not the sort of novel that attracts a lot of knockoffs.

The sort of novel that does attract knockoffs will doubtless be mainly written by AI in the near future. But it will probably be superseded in turn by AI dramas. So reading for entertainment alone will become increasingly rare.

I expect we will return to a culture where people who read are mainly looking for new ideas.