Willow H. Wood

Can we go back to a world before AI? My whole life, I have worked tirelessly to improve my writing craft. I was writing senseless picture books at 6 and short stories at 11. Half-baked novels at 14. Serious books at 16. I went to university to have my ass wrung through the meat-grinder of creative criticism and male-dominated classes, all the while writing through the night. Crying over what felt like 70 thousand words of wasted time, again and again, but it was all learning. All improvement. All painstaking love for the craft of telling stories, and now what? How do I prove my words are all my sweat and tears? Do I go back to writing 200,000 words with ink and paper? The very idea that someone’s work could be cancelled by misinformation and fallible AI checkers breaks my heart. The idea that there’s no substantial way to prove that my Word document contains 100% my agonising effort. It stabs deep, because a single novel is the soul grafted from a lifetime of cumulative effort. Ariana’s got it right.