When Is A Writer Not A Writer?

Handmade vs AI mass production…

Cee R.
2 min readJun 4, 2023
Potter making pottery on a potter’s wheel (as they tend to do.)
Photo by Courtney Cook on Unsplash

Have you ever, when out shopping, come across an item — a necklace or a piece of pottery, perhaps — and noticed that it’s marked ‘handmade’…

…and it’s so intricate, so beautiful, that you just think -

Wow.

A human made this? This beautiful thing in your hands? That’s incredible. That’s… wow.

And it might not be the most beautiful, the most intricate, piece in the shop.

But a human made this with their own hands.

And it makes it… just that bit more.

We expect the ‘handmade’ label to only be on things that were made by hand.

If you didn’t write something yourself, if you got a machine to write it for you — not in collaboration, not as a jump-off point, not as a tool to refine your own hands’ creation — you are not a writer.

At best, you’re a content farmer. Sorry.

I prefer my writing to be handmade.

Writing Prompt from Warren "Storyteller" Brown:

What type of writer are you, the one who gets an A.I. text generator to prepare work that you pass off

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Cee R.

Writer, reader, poet, (book) blogger @ dorareads.co.uk , Queer, weird, bookish rebel. Welsh as a tractor on the M4. Buy me a coffee @ ko-fi.com/ceearr