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.

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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.’

I enjoyed writing all my stories. Sure, they were not exactly high art. I never expected a call from the Pulitzer panel or an invitation from Radio 4 to discuss how I manage to express the human condition. But coming up with characters, throwing them into difficult situations and seeing how they coped, writing dialogue that felt real, inventing satisfying-yet-believable twists, was all fun to write and, I hope, fun to read.

So I began typing my reply to Rebecca. I hadn’t even finished the first sentence when the truth occurred to me: Rebecca doesn’t exist. If a women’s magazine no longer needs writers, why does it need an ‘in-house team’? A vision rose in my mind of someone arriving at an office in the morning, switching on a........

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