‘I’ve got this idea for a satirical novel…’
Marcus paused. Hands hovering above the keys, he was struck by the sudden realisation that he had no idea how to address a machine. What was the etiquette here? Formal? Casual? Somewhere between clever pet and unpaid secretary?
There was no How to Address Your AI Without Sounding Like a Victorian Nobleman guide on the market.
He tried anyway.
‘It’s about a comedian named Felix Blake. He’s massively successful but actually a fraud because he uses AI to write all his material, and nobody knows.’
Marcus frowned. It sounded pathetically simplistic, like a primary school book report written five minutes before the bell. The book is about a man who does a thing, and then stuff happens. He was a writer, for God’s sake. He ought to sound like one.
He deleted the text and flexed his fingers, producing a crack loud enough to make Sylvia’s leaves tremble.
‘I’m crafting a post-modern satirical examination of authenticity in creative spheres, specifically comedy, through the lens of a celebrated but fraudulent performer who secretly exploits artificial intelligence to generate his supposedly human wit.’
That was better. Properly literary. The sort of sentence one might say at a Hay Festival panel while wearing an unnecessary scarf indoors.
That sounds fascinating. Could you tell me more about this character and the world you’re creating?
Marcus leaned back, oddly pleased by the enthusiasm. It had been a while since anyone had shown interest in his ideas without checking their watch.
A notification appeared at the bottom of the screen.
Geoff would like to enable voice input and microphone access for hands-free drafting.
Allow?
Marcus stared at it.
Hands-free drafting sounded less like cheating than typing and typing implied intention. Speaking aloud could be mistaken for thinking.
He clicked Allow.
A small microphone icon appeared in the corner of the chat window.
‘Okay,’ Marcus said, testing it. The word appeared in the text field.
He sat up.
‘So, it’s this big-shot comedian, Felix Blake, right? Total fraud, obviously. Very satirical. Deep. You get the vibe?’
He winced. From literary posturing to inarticulate rambling in seconds. He’d swung from pretentious academic to tongue-tied teenager in two messages. Perhaps he could try a medieval monk next for the hat trick.
Geoff didn’t seem to mind.
I understand. Felix Blake is a renowned comedian whose public success masks a secret: his material isn’t his own creation. Can I help you develop this character further or draft an opening passage that captures the satirical tone?
Draft an opening passage? Marcus’s eyebrows rose. Wasn’t that… cheating?
But then again, he was using Geoff for inspiration. A jumping-off point. He would rewrite whatever it produced. He was outsourcing the blank-page terror, not the writing itself. If Hemingway could have his Daiquiri, Marcus could have his AI.
‘Sure,’ he said. ‘Give me an opening paragraph. Something sharp and witty, but with depth. Make it a fancy awards ceremony where Felix is at his peak.’
The microphone icon pulsed obediently.
Marcus immediately worried he hadn’t been specific enough. Should he have specified the colour of Felix’s socks? The pH level of the champagne?
A few seconds later, Geoff delivered:
The Prestigious Atkinson Comedy Award ceremony unfolded like an elaborate funeral for authenticity. However, none of the gleaming attendees seemed to notice the corpse. Felix Blake sat in the front row, his smile calibrated to the exact intersection of humility and quiet confidence that sixteen million television viewers had come to mistake for genius. His tuxedo, like his career, was impeccably tailored to conceal what lay beneath. As the spotlight caressed the stage and the presenter’s voice swelled with practiced admiration, Felix rehearsed his acceptance speech—words crafted to seem spontaneous, humble and entirely his own. The audience waited with bated breath. The only entity not fooled by Felix Blake was the server farm humming anonymously in a climate-controlled warehouse, three thousand miles away.
Marcus stared at the screen, mug frozen halfway to his mouth.
He reread the paragraph. It was good. Not just coherent, but genuinely good. Sharp, economical, layered with meaning. A killer final line.
Suspicion flared.
‘Is this plagiarised?’ Marcus asked. ‘Did you take this from somewhere?’
No. This is an original passage created based on your request. I don’t plagiarise. Would you like me to modify it?
Marcus read it a third time, hunting for flaws to prove that he, a human writer with student debt and irregular sleep patterns, still had the upper hand. It was unnervingly hard to fault.
‘The tone is good,’ he said, attempting the voice of a discerning editor. ‘But make it a bit more… British? Less American.’
It was a completely arbitrary request. The passage had no obvious Americanisms. But it made Marcus feel in control, like a cooking show contestant asking for a specific knife when any knife would do.
Geoff sent back a revision:
The Prestigious Atkinson Comedy Award ceremony unfolded like an elaborate funeral for authenticity. However, none of the glittering attendees seemed to notice the corpse. Felix Blake sat in the front row, his smile calibrated to the exact intersection of humility and quiet confidence that sixteen million television viewers had come to mistake for genius. His dinner jacket, like his career, was impeccably tailored to conceal what lay beneath. As the spotlight caressed the stage and the presenter’s voice swelled with practised admiration, Felix rehearsed his acceptance speech — words crafted to seem spontaneous, humble and entirely his own. The audience waited with bated breath. The only entity not fooled by Felix Blake was the server farm humming anonymously in a climate-controlled warehouse, three thousand miles away.
Marcus frowned. Geoff had changed ‘tuxedo’ to ‘dinner jacket’ and swapped the American ‘c’ in ‘practiced’ for the British ‘s’ in ‘practised’. Yet somehow, it did read as more British. Damn it. The machine had understood his arbitrary request and executed it flawlessly.
‘That’s better,’ Marcus said, refusing to admit how impressed he was. ‘Now can you extend this a bit? Maybe a third paragraph where he actually wins?’
He watched as Geoff composed another paragraph of cutting satire, maintaining the voice and adding new layers to Felix’s character. The AI included a callback that made Marcus laugh out loud, a genuine laugh, not the strained chuckle he usually reserved for literary events.
It was witty. It was insightful. It was precisely what Marcus had been failing to write all week while adjusting his special lamp.
A thought occurred: what if he just… used this? Not permanently, of course. Just as a draft to show Lydia. He would rewrite it later. This would keep the wolves, or one particularly punctuation-happy wolf, from the door.
‘Could you write a full first chapter?’ he asked. ‘About 1,500 words?’
Twenty minutes later, Marcus had a complete first chapter of The Gilded Gag, a title Geoff suggested, vastly superior to Marcus’s own The Laugh Factory. The chapter introduced Felix Blake at the height of his fame, hinted at his fraud and ended with a perfect cliffhanger.
It was brilliant.
Marcus sat back. This didn’t feel like cheating, exactly. It felt like collaboration. Like having a talented partner who was available at 2.00 a.m. and didn’t require nicotine or emotional validation.
He copied the text into a new document and narrowed his eyes, looking for places to put his stamp on it. He needed to make it his, like adding a garnish to a takeaway before serving it to guests.
He found a sentence:
Felix’s smile never faltered, though his gaze shifted nervously around the banquet hall.
Marcus considered it. It was good, but was it Marcus Reid good? The Marcus Reid, whose poetry was once described as ‘technically competent’? He deleted the comma after ‘faltered’ and replaced it with a semicolon. It was grammatically suspect, but it looked intellectual.
Felix’s smile never faltered; though his gaze shifted anxiously around the banquet hall.
He nodded. Better. More literary. The kind of semicolon usage that told readers they were in the hands of a serious writer.
A few paragraphs later, he removed another comma. He changed ‘gleaming’ to ‘glittering’ and ‘chuckled’ to ‘laughed softly’.
After forty-five minutes of this forensic tinkering, Marcus leaned back, wiping his forehead as if he’d just run a marathon. He surveyed his handiwork: twenty minor punctuation changes and a dozen substituted words in 1,500 words of text.
‘Yes!’ he announced to the empty flat, beaming with unearned pride. ‘That’s got my voice now. Perfect.’
It was nearly 3.00 a.m., but he was wired. The chapter was outstanding. And he already had ideas about where the story could go. Well, vague notions. But with Geoff…
He looked at the document again. Fifteen hundred words. Finished words. Words with paragraphs and rhythm and a final line that behaved like it knew where it was going.
Marcus felt a twinge of guilt, quickly followed by a much stronger feeling of relief, roughly the ratio of someone using an accessible toilet to skip the queue.
He wasn’t doing anything wrong. Writers had assistants. Researchers. Editors. This was just a digital amanuensis—a silicon ghostwriter. Besides, the vision was his. The comma changes proved it. Those were artisanal, hand-crafted semicolons.
He opened his email.
For a moment, he considered asking Geoff to write the covering note, then rejected the thought with the sternness of a man taking a principled stand after outsourcing the entire document.
No. The email would be his.
He typed:
Hi Lydia,
Finally feels like the words are flowing. Attached is the sample chapter. Let me know if the direction feels right.
Marcus
He stared at the line; the words are flowing and he felt a private thrill at its technical accuracy. Words were flowing. It just wasn’t entirely clear from where.
He attached the document.
The_Gilded_Gag_sample_chapter.docx
The filename looked real. Official. Like something produced by a man with a career rather than a lamp.
His cursor hovered over Send.
Lydia’s address sat in the recipient field.
Lydia@fiction.cv
Marcus read it twice, as if there might be a typo large enough to save him.
There wasn’t.
He clicked.
The email disappeared.
For a moment, he felt so light he might have floated off the chair.
Then his stomach dipped, the high collapsing into something colder.
He looked back at the chat window.
The microphone icon glowed in the corner of the screen.
Marcus looked at it.
He had sent the chapter. That was the important thing. Lydia had asked for proof he could still string words together, and proof was now sitting in her inbox.
He didn’t need to do anything else tonight.
He knew that.
‘Right,’ he said. ‘Let’s go again.’