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Is AI a threat or a wonderful resource?

Posted on 1st September, 2025

 A few months ago I posted about AI and I said that I wasn’t worried. I now am – very worried on the effect it’s going to have on creative work as well as many other areas.
Did you know that the top eighty-five in the YA Romantasy section in Amazon were all written by AI? This is on Kindle Unlimited not the for sale books – as I explained to somebody else if you’re paying a monthly subscription then you are prepared to take a risk on a book if you like the cover and the blurb. I imagine that the majority of people who downloaded these AI books sent them back almost immediately.
Of far more concern to me is a survey of a thousand readers that Christian Cameron (the very best historical and sci-fi writer in the world in my opinion) and three other North American writers carried out. They each wrote a short story and then asked AI to write one in a similar style to theirs – they then sent all eight stories to the thousand readers and collated the results. Not one reader got it right – in fact two of the authors failed to identify the short story written by their friends. These are only short stories – I imagine that in a year or two full-length novels will be appearing that are indistinguishable from the real thing.
Sir Paul McCartney has been following the development of AI and said that he believes in the year he won’t be able to tell his own compositions from those replicated by AI.
I use AI now for research – I find that a phenomenally useful tool – far quicker than rummaging through a dozen research books. I don’t see how the providers can do this for nothing but it’s a truly useful resource for writers and for anybody else.
Now you see my conundrum – obviously I don’t want AI copying my books, bypassing me and meaning that I no longer an a living from my writing. However, having this incredible tool at my fingertips is making my writing so much easier. Being a historical fiction writer there is so much to check and AI can check it a hundred if not a thousand times quicker than I can.
Of course, it won’t always be accurate, but usually the things I’m asking are things that I’d recognise as being incorrect.
What do you think? Have we let a malevolent genie out of the bottle? Is AI as dangerous as some say?
Fenella J Miller