Only A Tool

By Jon Lymon

When his livelihood is wiped out by artificial intelligence, a copywriter facing the end of his career puts down his pen, steps away from his desk and fights for his future.

While the Anti Ai revel in the hero's cutting and increasingly creative attacks against those inflicting automation on the world, the pro Ai throw predictable Luddite accusations at the hero, urging him to get off his horse and cart and work with the tech, treating it as a tool.

 

But our hero knows AI means to be more than a tool. The goal of its creators is to completely replace humans, first in the workplace, and then in the world. Can the rise of anti-humanity machines be stopped?

Only A Tool tackles the sad reality facing millions in the 2020s - loss of jobs to Ai. It follows one writer's desperate attempts to keep earning a living as machines take over.

 

It's a story of fear and hope set in a time of frightening change - the present day.

 

Unsurprisingly, no AI was used to create this work of fiction.

 

#CreateDontScrape #SupportHumanArtists #CopywritersUnite #AntiAI

• Language: English
• Publisher: Jon Lymon
• Release date: Mar 25, 2024
• ISBN: 9798223740803

Jon Lymon

The truth isn't stranger than my fiction.Jon Lymon writes thrillers for adults and cute animal stories for kids, though one day he might swap that around. He lives in south London and likes cheese, and biscuits. But not cheese and biscuits.

Book preview

Only A Tool

AND OTHER AI LIES

1

My world turned upside down on the 23rd of November 2022, although I didn’t know it at the time.

Before then, my life had been trundling along beautifully badly, pretty much like everyone else’s. Then something happened on the other side of the world, in someone’s bedroom or basement office, who knows exactly where, that was to affect mine and everybody else’s life.

The impact was so innocuous at first, few noticed. It didn’t make the news, no one talked about it at work or on video calls, and only a few posted about it online, so the day shaped up much like any other.

‘Dad?’ she shouted at me from her bedroom at the far end of the landing. 

I checked my phone. 4:42am.

‘Yeah?’

‘Are you awake?’

‘Of course. You ok?’

The first of many times I’d ask her that during an average day, even though she was 14 and stronger than me and almost as tall and definitely smarter and more streetwise.

‘Just a bit sad,’ she said.

‘Yeah. I understand.’

A few hours earlier, I’d told her we’d have to move out of the only house she’d ever known. The house to which we bought her back from the hospital after she’d been born three weeks prematurely.

‘It’ll take a while to sell,’ I said. ‘All the paperwork and stuff.’

‘So we’ll be here for Christmas?’

‘Oh yeah. I hope so.’

This was the house where Santa visited her every year right up until three years ago. I knew how closely that bonded a child to a place.

‘Try and get back to sleep,’ I called out, thinking that in a few years it would probably be possible to create Santa for real. A red and white clad bot delivering presents at the speed of light to homes across the world. Not beyond the realms anymore. Nothing was.

‘Ok. Love you.’

‘Love you.’

I turned to face the wall, the mattress of my single bed creaking under the strain.

Decent sleep and me had been strangers for some time, so I found staying awake easy. I smiled to myself when I heard my daughter’s gentle breathing – great how the young found it so easy to return to dreamland.

Knowing I had no chance of joining her there, I edged quietly out of my bed to the desk at its end. Tapped the Mac awake. Sorry machine, but if I can’t sleep neither can you.

Work to be done. Copywriting. Full time from home back then. Over 20 years of agency experience under my belt. Webpages, emails, TV ads, radio spots, posters, brochures, I wrote them all for clients all over the world, though I’d say most were US based, about 30% in my homeland of the UK. And I was pretty good. To still be going at 51 I had to be. A rarity in such an ageist industry as advertising. But that’s another story I won’t have time to tell.

For the record and for younger readers, a copywriter was someone who wrote words using their own hands and brain, the purpose of those words being to raise awareness of and (dirty word coming up here) sell a product or service.

I’d been freelancing for almost 10 years, making a decent living. Enough to support me and my daughter.

We’d made it through Covid virtually unscathed. We had the first Covid-free festive season for a few years to look forward to that Christmas, despite the threatening Omicron strain. But, don’t worry, this isn’t another pandemic story. What happened over the next few months was way bigger, far more disturbing and ultimately life-changing for everyone.

2

So here I am, this is me, another fifty-something single white male running out of gas and struggling to get out of bed without moaning about it. Yawn. Pass him a scalpel somebody. If he’s so intent on going, let him go. He’s lived a life. 51 is an OK age to go anyway, right? Some might say it’s no age, but I had major gripes about that term ‘no age’ – it needed to be reserved for the children who should have lived but were never born due to the deliberate misdiagnoses thousands of pregnant parents received when, earlier in 2022, MediBots unilaterally decided to take steps to reduce the human population, prescribing drugs that terminated the lives of perfectly healthy foetuses.

I’ve shot my bolt there a little. Got to the crux of this before I needed to. I wanted to build up to that, but I find it hard to contain my fury about what’s happened to the world. An inevitable outcome of the rise of the machines.

I’ll admit, the impact of the work faceless developers had been up to during the pandemic (and were still up to in their windowless bedrooms and dingy BO-infested basements afterwards) didn’t hit home until it reared its ugly headless head, not in my back yard, but in the heart of my home office.

I knew and I said at the time they didn’t know what they were doing, that they had no idea where their surrendering of power to machines would lead. But this was no age to be anti-progress. We were entering the age of new dawns and dreams, fresh hope on post-pandemic planet Earth.

I often wondered if any of this would have happened had the pandemic not. Lockdowns gave people time away from other people, a chance to lose touch with what it meant to be human. Time to mess around on their computers.

The result of their bored insanity took a few months to surface after that fateful November day, but when it reared, it bore all the ugly hallmarks of the bitterness of misanthropy.

Everyone became a stranger to socialising during Covid, and in its wake, somehow, the people who seldom socialised before Covid, who struggled to fit in and make human friendships and be accepted in the real world, they didn’t seem so strange anymore. The geeks who’d been picked on at school, regularly getting their hair forcibly rinsed in toilet bowls at breaktimes now saw an opportunity to exact revenge on their now adult tormentors. Computers had been their only true friends during those bitter schooldays. Trusted allies they came home to and learned to talk to, and who didn’t threaten them or answer back. Computers did what they told them to do. Gave them power in their curtained or blinded bedroom worlds. All along, they knew one day they would exact revenge on a world that didn’t appreciate their difference, their genius. And that one day dawned in November 2022.

Introverted individuals who were more comfortable with a screen in hand than a drink in hand were now calling the shots, ruling the roost over the rest of us as we tried to return to normality, living a little and working less. The neo-misanthropists had disguised themselves as saviours, working in IT departments or as lone freelancers, bearing the gift of visually and verbally impressive tech wrapped in a promise to improve everyone’s life in every possible way.

How did such overclaims sneak under the radar? How did anyone truly believe that this monstrosity would or could benefit every facet of human life?

That November day, a danger far greater than Covid was unleashed by people who hated mankind with a passion. Well, you’d have to hate your fellow man with a passion to develop something as anti-humanity as job stealing Artificial Intelligence.

3

Before we go any further, I need to make it clear that NO brand names of Ai products will be mentioned in this work. NONE whatso-fucking-ever. I refuse to give any of them the oxygen of publicity. Not that they need it. The handful of people developing them are worth billions, their tech trained on the creative output and labour of way more talented artists and writers. And not only did those artists and writers receive zero compensation from the mega-rich developers for having their work used without permission, they also had work opportunities stolen by the machines. Clients who once hired humans to write or create art for them could now get it from a machine for free. An utterly gut-wrenching situation for every creative who’d taken time to develop their talent.

OK. Let’s rewind to earlier this year, February 2023, the other side of the first post-Covid Christmas that passed by happily, my daughter and I still in the same house, me still making a decent living as a copywriter.

I was mid some kind of beautifully crafted sentence when I received what I now regard as a Exocet missile of a message.

‘Have you seen this?’ the email was entitled. Dirk Wilson, my design partner of over twenty years sitting, forwarded me news of the release of a new tool that claimed the ability to string sentences together like a human.

It’s been out a few months, apparently, Dirk had typed. You can ask it for anything. You can even ask it to write like Shakespeare or Dickens or someone else dead, and it’ll spin out a sonnet in seconds.

I was too busy and important to take such claims seriously. Who’d want a machine that could write when you had the likes of me?

‘Sounds shit,’ I said, on the follow up call.

Dirk took a more considered approach. ‘This is going to give anyone with a pulse access to a machine that can churn out words almost as good as veteran scribes like you.’

That got my attention and I asked Dirk to send me the link but I didn’t click it for days. Business was still good if a little under normal levels, the words still flowing. Just because Dirk had heard of this writing machine didn’t mean to say clients had. And hopefully it would disappear off the face of the internet before a writing veteran like me - who’d been at it 25 years – (did I already mention that?) - had reason to worry.

Beefcake, a fellow writer who was hairier and more obese than his nickname suggested, and who dabbled in copy in faraway lands called Dubai and Australia before settling in London, sent me the same link a week later. Have you heard of this machine that spews out copy 24/7 for next to nothing, without a need for shit breaks, liquid lunches, holidays or pay rises? It’s been available for free since November apparently, and it’s an endless intestine that bilges out content pollution like shit in seconds, on-demand?

I was up to my eyes in a brochure assignment at the time, and replied to Beefcake that the machine was welcome to take over this current project, a steaming shit of a challenge, but nonetheless a decent earner.

The third message I received about the copy tech came from Christopher, reportedly the oldest designer still in regular employment in adland, well past statutory retirement age but so dedicated and talented, he kept getting hired by progressively more youthful creative directors. He generally communicated via telephone calls instead of text or email messages. That’s how old we’re talking.

He announced on one such call: ‘Hannah brought this to my attention over breakfast, old chap. I must say I read it with grave concern for your future.’ He quoted a few paragraphs from an article with which I was already acquainted, focusing on this new CopyBot tech now freely available online.

‘I’m aware of its work,’ I told him.

‘This has been foretold,’ he forewarned.

‘Where, in the runes, the stars, the tea leaves?’ I asked.

‘I’m serious,’ he said, sounding it. ‘I know where this leads and it’s not a good place for you.’

Christopher was given to dramatic exaggeration from time to time, so he didn’t have me quaking in my desert boots just yet.

‘Look for alternative employment - now,’ he advised.

‘Bit of an over-reaction, isn’t it, Christopher?’

‘Not at all. Myself and Hannah have already decided to go ahead with opening the bookshop.’

‘You’re leaving advertising?’

‘No. Just covering our derrieres.’

‘But neither of you are writers. What have you got to worry about?’

‘This is a march, old chap,’ he re-forewarned. ‘The machines will not stop at writers. Designers. Retouchers. Proofreaders. Account Directors will all fall foul of this automation. Mark my words.’

His hanging up so suddenly certainly left a mark in my ears, but an almost instant call from the account manager for whom I was writing the challenging brochure swept away all fears. For now.

4

Early February rained into late February and business remained brisk if a little cooler than normal from the other side of the Atlantic, where clients for whom I’d write landing pages and listings on Airbnb didn’t seem quite so keen to engage my services. I vowed to monitor the situation, with a price drop and a speeding up of my delivery time usually the remedy to inject interest back into my offerings.

Domestically, my skills remained in demand. And not hearing from Beefcake or Christopher, whom we were now referring to as Christopher Bookshop following the recent opening of his Southwest London store, suggested all was well with them too.

I had noticed, however, more of my social feeds filling with Ai related conferences, courses, and a plethora of prompts. Disturbingly, no one peddling these prompts could spell the fucking word, not that anyone seemed to care.

5

Late February. Wednesday. Lunchtime. Cold, wet and windy. Beefcake returning to the table at the Duke of Wellington public house in Fitzrovia, central London, with a tray of alcoholic beverages for himself, myself, Sophie, Scooch and a few others around the table. I can’t remember everyone, although I know for a fact Wendock was there. Unfortunately.

‘What shall we ask it to do?’ I asked.

‘Kill itself?’ Beefcake suggested.

Sounded good to me.

‘What’s the most banal request we can think of?’ Scooch asked.

Everyone looked to Wendock and I sensed his humiliation.

‘Emails,’ Sophie ventured. ‘I’d actually welcome a bot that can take writing those off my desk.’

‘Be careful what you wish for,’ Beefcake said seriously, eyes fixed on Sophie, a talented late thirty-something writer, outstanding at thinking up ideas, even better at motivating and mentoring young writers.

Wendock typed in: write a cold calling email designed to get people to call about this new foldable iron that can be packed in suitcases for easy transportation.

We all read it and nodded, and he hit the button that started the machine doing whatever it did.

I don’t know how long we expected to wait, more than the seven seconds I timed on my Fitbit, at last finding a use for the Christmas present I’d bought myself.

The machine splurged out a few paragraphs of copy a line at a time at a speed north of four thousand words per minute.

‘It’s quick,’ someone accurately pointed out.

‘But what about the quality?’ Although I tried to look calm, my heart was racing. I’d heard enough about this writing machine to now know it needed to be taken seriously.

We took turns to read its output, all of us desperate to find fault, to mock the spelling, syntax, sentence structure. But everyone read in absolute silence before solemnly passing the laptop around the table like a hot potato minus the health benefits.

When my turn came, I knew after the first paragraph the future of everyone around that silent table looked as bleak as the weather. All of us writers would be in trouble if this tech was allowed to proliferate.

‘Another drink, methinks,’ said Beefcake as we all sat in reflective and worried silence, and he made his way back to the bar.

‘You’re fired,’ Dirk told me when he called the next day. ‘I’m going solo. Now I can write and design everything myself.’

‘Thanks, Dirk,’ I said, having reported back to him our the findings of the previous day. And although he was joking, I got a real sense of the end being nigh, the writing being on the wall for copywriters like me rather than on the page or screen where we preferred it. Our once well-paid jobs would soon be gone, like the street lamp lighters, projectionists and dispatch riders.

‘Not that I’m laughing at you,’ Dirk added. ‘I’m on the Ai hitlist myself.’

He told me about two new apps he’d seen, one an extension to the omnipresent PhotoShop that slashed hours off the time taken to perform previously complicated tasks like image cut-outs. The other a bit of tech that animated static images just by highlighting them.

‘Even you could produce pretty decent visuals in just a few minutes,’ he said. ‘Used to take me hours. Well-paid hours.’

6

And so the devaluation of human talent began - subtly at first, almost imperceptibly. It wasn’t immediately obvious who was responsible for the slow death of my career and that of other creatives. I couldn’t go and meet this nemesis for a drink and talk through a solution – like I was doing at the time with my estranged spouse as we ironed out the finer details of our divorce. The marriage had been short, our daughter making it all worthwhile. But the separation promised to be costly financially and emotionally.

Christopher Bookshop wasn’t the only creative sensing an existential threat looming. Alex Inverness, a copywriter with what was to prove the most unfortunate set of initials and foreshortened first name was also worried. For decades he’d battled to convince people he wasn’t Scottish, never having ventured north of the border and insistent that he was unable to pinpoint the location of Inverness on a map. That battle won, he now had a fight on his hands to prove he wasn’t pro-Ai. ‘It’s just my name,’ he’d tell people. ‘I always sign my work with my initials. You know, this was created by AI.’

‘You’re going to have to reconsider that, mate,’ Beefcake advised during a luncheon meeting that involved much beer and little food.

‘Why should I change just because of machines?’

‘Because every piece of work I read and every image I see that’s signed AI is going up in flames,’ said Beefcake.

7

Spring was soon in the air and joined by equally widespread fear. All humans with jobs were looking over their shoulders, waiting for the email announcement to land with a bomb-like shudder in their inbox. I regret to inform you... It’s with deep sadness... Unfortunately, due to a root and branch business review...

I took solace from fellow writers, designers and illustrators who bemoaned the drying up and dying of their workstreams via posts on LinkedIn, Beefcake now among them. Dirk too. Christopher Bookshop. Alex Inverness. We were all in the same sinking boat together. 

‘Choose between being a real life hero or villain,’ one art director implored an Ai inventor on a stream I regularly viewed to get the latest on jobs I was too old to apply for, or news of new business start ups for whom I’d double the average age, as well as details about technical advances I couldn’t comprehend. ‘Because right now, make no mistake, you are the latter,’ the art director continued.

‘Why develop something the world doesn’t need, something that ruins people’s careers?’ another asked.