Nobody Writes Alone

Since people started asking how this book was made, one question keeps coming back: "So a machine wrote it?" It deserves a straight answer, and the straight answer is older than the machine. No serious book was ever written alone. Here is the record, then the facts of mine.

In 1929 a manuscript of half a million words, by his editor's own account, reached Charles Scribner's Sons. The editor Maxwell Perkins read all of it, then sat down with Thomas Wolfe and cut the book to size, scene by scene. What came out of that cutting was Look Homeward, Angel. The name on the cover is Wolfe's. It always is.¹

A year later, a new name appeared on a children's mystery: Carolyn Keene, author of Nancy Drew. Carolyn Keene never existed. The Stratemeyer Syndicate sent out plot outlines of two or three pages, and Mildred Wirt Benson turned them into books - 23 of the first 30 - for a flat fee, signing away all rights.²

In 1956, Senator John F. Kennedy published Profiles in Courage. It won the Pulitzer Prize. His speechwriter Ted Sorensen wrote in his own memoir, decades later, that he had produced a first draft of most of the chapters and helped choose the words of many of its sentences.³

James Patterson, described by the Washington Post as the world's best-selling author, works with a stable of co-writers. He builds the detailed outline; the co-writer drafts; the chapters must be short; and if there is a disagreement, the last word is Patterson's.⁴

In 2023, Prince Harry published Spare. The man who held the pen, J.R. Moehringer, was reportedly paid $1 million. He had done the same for Andre Agassi's Open and Phil Knight's Shoe Dog.⁵

A century of publishing, one division of labour. The gathering, the drafting and the testing could always be hired. What readers argued about, every time, was a shorter question: who did the judging?

Then the help learned to type.

In 1984 a computer program called Racter produced The Policeman's Beard Is Half Constructed, published as an ordinary paperback - the first book written by a machine and sold as one.⁶ In 2016 a research team at Future University Hakodate entered stories written with their own program into Japan's Hoshi Shinichi literary award - one of them titled The Day a Computer Writes a Novel. One of the team's entries passed the first of four judging rounds, and the organisers disclosed that eleven of the 2,561 submissions had been written with computer help.⁷ In 2018, Ross Goodwin bolted a camera, a GPS unit, a microphone and a clock to a Cadillac, drove from New York to New Orleans, and let a neural network print the novel as it went, line by line on receipt paper. The book is called 1 the Road.⁸ In 2020, K Allado-McDowell spent a fortnight in conversation with the language model GPT-3 and published the exchange as Pharmako-AI, described by its author as the first book co-created with that model.⁹ In late 2022, a product manager in San Francisco made a children's picture book, Alice and Sparkle, in a single weekend - ChatGPT for the words, Midjourney for the pictures - and put it on sale; illustrators were furious.¹⁰ In 2023 the novelist Stephen Marche published a crime novella, Death of an Author, and says 95 per cent of its text came out of AI tools.¹¹

Count the shelves: experimental fiction, prize short stories, the road novel, philosophy, the picture book, crime. There is an AI book in every section now.

Most of these were experiments - the machine's output was the point of the exercise. But there is a second, quieter kind of AI book, where the machine is not the point. The thinking is the point, and the machine is the help. The difference between the two is not the tool. It is who reads, who judges, and who decides.

Now the facts of mine, set down the way the book sets them down.

I am a civil engineer. The writing began in 2021, in the hours a working life leaves behind, and it took five years. The book cites 473 works: 262 peer-reviewed studies, 87 books, 53 works of journalism, 49 official reports and public inquiries, 11 hearing transcripts and court records, and 11 classical texts. It carries 594 endnotes, one for every claim that needed one. Each source was checked against the original, each quotation to the last word, and anything that could not be verified came out. In an age of AI hallucination, a reference has to be hunted back to its source before it can be trusted. That hunting, claim by claim, is where most of the five years went.

Inside that work, AI did what the hired help used to do. It gathered material, tested arguments, collected facts and assisted in the writing. It was checked at every step, and it was never left to decide. The reading, the judging and the deciding were not delegated. The argument, the cases, the opinions and any errors belong to me.

So the straight answer. A machine did not write this book - but then, no one person ever writes a book worth reading. What I replaced was the help: the researcher, the typist, the sparring partner an earlier author would have paid. Not the author. The authorship was never on offer. The method that made this book is the method it teaches: use every tool to your advantage; depend on none of them.

What Are We Missing? is in final author review, planned for 13 February 2027. The sources are printed with the book. Check them. That is what they are for.