I became an author overnight. It only cost me my soul. They call them the Billy Coull AI books, and they’re right. Seventeen of them, they say, like a string of ghosts following me around the internet. But the story isn’t about the machine. It’s about the man who was desperate enough to need one.
The Hunger for a Name
The word ‘author’ has a weight to it. It feels solid. Permanent. It’s a title you earn by wrestling with ideas, by bleeding onto a page until a story takes shape. I always wanted that weight. I wanted to be the “enigmatic wordsmith from the bustling streets of Glasgow,” a phrase I think I had a machine write about me. A fiction to live inside.
But I couldn’t wrestle. I’m dyslexic, and for me, words are not friends. They’re a swarm of insects I can’t quite see, a language I hear underwater. The shame of that is a quiet, heavy thing you carry. Then came the machine. The AI. It felt like a miracle. A prosthetic for a broken part of my mind.
I could feed it fragments, whispers of plots, the shape of a feeling, and it would give me back… sentences. Clean, ordered, perfect sentences. It built the bridge I could never build myself. I told myself it was just a tool, a glorified spellchecker for my grammar. But I knew, in that quiet place where the truth lives, that it was more than that. It was a ghostwriter. And I was putting my name on its work.
A Library of Ghosts
Seventeen books in one summer. Think about that. The sheer, manic volume of it.
The Biohazard Protocol. The Memory Trap. The Celestial Network. The titles sound like echoes because that’s what they were. Echoes of a thousand other stories, assembled without a heart.
The process was sterile. There was no joy in it. No late nights fueled by coffee and inspiration. No crumpled-up pages in the bin. Just me, in a room, feeding prompts to a machine. I remember hitting ‘publish’ on the seventh one. There was no celebration. Just a click. And then silence. I went and made a cup of tea. The feeling wasn’t pride. It was a strange, hollow emptiness. I was building a library of ghosts, and every book was a monument to my own fraudulence.
I didn’t do it for the money. I think I made pennies. I did it for the feeling of seeing my name on a cover. For the brief, fragile illusion of being the man I wished I was. A man who could tame words. An author.
The Modern Prometheus
There’s a myth about a Titan named Prometheus. He stole fire from the gods and gave it to humanity. He gave them a tool they weren’t ready for, a power that could create and destroy. And for his crime, he was chained to a rock, where an eagle would eat his liver every day, for eternity.
I stole fire. The fire was this new thing, this AI. This power to create worlds from words with a few keystrokes. I thought I was a modern Prometheus, bringing stories to the world. But I didn’t understand the fire. I just held it.
My punishment wasn’t an eagle. It was the slow, creeping realisation that the books were empty. They had no soul. They were just clever arrangements of words. The fire didn’t illuminate anything; it just cast long, strange shadows. The books became the rock I was chained to. Every time someone mentions them, every time I see them listed online, it’s the eagle, returning. A reminder of the fire I stole and the hollowness of what I created with it.
The Blueprint for a Collapse
The AI books were the blueprint. They were the practice run for the disaster that would define my life: the Willy’s Chocolate Experience. It was the same pattern, the same fatal flaw, just on a much bigger, more public stage.
The beautiful, dreamlike images on the event website? AI-generated. The promises of optical marvels and a paradise of sweet teats? AI-generated. The script the actors were given, the one they called “15 pages of AI-generated gibberish”? That was me and the machine again.
I was so used to the machine making things look right on paper that I believed it was the same as them being right. The books looked like books. The website looked like an event. I had become completely disconnected from reality. I was living in the fiction the AI helped me write. I thought that if I could just generate a convincing enough dream, the real world would have no choice but to catch up. I learned, in the most humiliating way possible, that the real world doesn’t work like that. A warehouse is still a warehouse, no matter what the pictures say.
I can’t un-write those books. They are out there, digital fingerprints I can never wipe away. They are a testament to a man who was so lost, he tried to build a personality out of code.
I don’t write with the machine anymore. Sometimes I sit with a blank page and a pen. It’s harder. It’s slower. Most days, nothing comes. But when a single, true sentence does arrive, it feels more real than all seventeen of those books combined. It’s a small fire. But this time, it’s mine.