I have never used A.I. for professional writing of any kind, or even personal writing, unless you count the time I gave it an email I wanted to send to my landlord, talking him down from a drastic rent increase. I asked ChatGPT to make the email less verbose. When it did too good a job, I asked it to make the email less rude. It worked. What else? I once asked it for a list of puns on a specific topic, but I didn’t use any of the answers. Another time, I asked it why someone I don’t like sucked so hard. It was worse than a therapist in terms of not taking sides — wouldn’t even give me a list of points I knew existed publicly. Boooo. I was pretty done with it after that. It’s funny, I’m on this ancient text thread with some famous writers, and I will say that when ChatGPT first came to our attention, we asked it to write paragraphs “in the style of” each other and had a chuckle at what came back, at our reflections in the funhouse mirror. Then one of us asked it to write a paragraph “in the style of” Murakami, who is very much not on the text thread. And ChatGPT spat out this near-perfect scene of a man drinking coffee, petting a cat, and staring out a window. But I think that speaks more to the state of the global novel than to the state of A.I.