By Dan Brown

This column was not written by AI.

For better or worse, I’m the one who decided which words to use, and what order to put them in.

Not an artificial intelligence such as ChatGPT or Claude. Maybe you’ve heard of them.

Maybe you’ve also heard about “Daniel Robson” – the supposed journalist who had bylines in publications like the Ottawa Citizen, the Montreal Gazette, and the Western Standard over the last year.

Yeah, turns out all those pieces were AI slop and no such guy exists.

But of the 224 columns I’ve written so far on the website of L.A. Mood Comics & Games, not a one of them has been ghostwritten by a machine.

The blame for these columns, or any credit, goes solely to me.

Why am I telling you this? Because I realize AI is spreading rapidly. 

You and I both know that lazy companies rely on AI – or “super intelligence, as Donald Trump calls it – to do their marketing for them. Lazy students rely on AI to produce their term papers. There might even be lazy columnists out there who also outsource their work.

Not me. 

Maybe I’m a sucker for not taking the easy way out, but the truth is AI-generated sentences and paragraphs are not all that great. AI certainly has a “voice,” and it’s a weird one. 

I started out as a columnist in the 1990s writing the old-fashioned way, and I don’t intend to stop now, although it would be cool if they invented a device that could directly download your thoughts onto the computer screen, as musician Thomas Dolby once yearned for. After more than three decades as a journalist, typing is hell on my fingers!

Besides, even if it’s convenient for the writer, the general public has an instinctual aversion to AI. People find digital slop inherently creepy. You can tell if a piece of writing is done by an AI because it reads as though something’s off.

But you don’t need to be the most perceptive reader to be bothered by AI, or to find it unsettling – like all those extra fingers in AI-generated images.

And even though AI is currently the tech flavour of the month, I have hope for the future.

I do believe at some point there’ll be a backlash.

I’ve already seen a preview in the social-media accounts that are labelled by their owner as being run by actual humans, not bots. (Whether AI work should have to carry an identifying warning label, is an argument for another time.)

My best guess is that writers, artists and musicians will be doing more of this – making the fact their work is “handmade” into a calling card. 

Just like the hippies in the 1960s were part of a back-to-the-land movement that prized nature and old ways of relating to one another, I foresee a coming “back-to-humanity” wave, which will likely grow into a wide social movement. 

And I’ll be there as a journalist to document it – one painful keystroke at a time.

Dan Brown has covered pop culture for more than 34 years as a journalist and also moderates L.A. Mood’s monthly Graphic-Novel Group book club.