Category Books and Media

The Keyboard Has Never Been the Author

Auburn-haired author Alara debates her enormous manuscript with white-haired editor Tomiko, wearing sunglasses, a green editor's visor, and holding a red pencil. Behind them, a personified printing press, silk loom, typewriter, computer, and retro-futuristic AI robot compete for attention.

A machine can write a paragraph in seconds. Sometimes it's even a good paragraph. But does that make the machine an author — or the person using it a fraud?

Writers have always relied on tools, collaborators, editors, researchers, and ghostwriters. Generative AI introduces extraordinary new capabilities, but it also raises serious questions about copyright, creative ownership, professional livelihoods, and the integrity of published work.

In The Keyboard Has Never Been the Author, Doc Tomiko challenges the assumption that legitimate authorship requires personally producing every word. Through examples from fiction, journalism, publishing, and developmental editing, she argues that the true work of writing lies in imagination, intention, critical judgment, and responsibility for the finished product.

AI can generate prose, suggest revisions, and help people tell stories they might otherwise never write. It can also produce mountains of mediocre garbage and give publishers new excuses to stop paying professionals.

The question isn't whether a machine helped write the words. It's who decided what those words should mean, whether they belong, and whether they're any damned good.

The keyboard was never the author. Neither is the AI.

On Separation Anxiety

Silhouetted man with dog on an empty city street at sunrise, holding coffee and grocery bag; no other people or lights visible.

Separation Anxiety (from Last Man Standing)
A lone survivor wakes in a world emptied overnight of every other human voice. Pets still need feeding, coffee still goes stale, and the Internet hums with nothing new to say. Through small rituals—feeding the animals, raiding a gas-station for fried chicken, worrying about the morality of burglary—he builds a fragile code of civility to hold off the madness of absolute solitude. When the lights finally go out, he must decide whether survival itself is worth the effort.

Separation Anxiety is the opening movement of a planned cycle, Last Man Standing, in which different isolated souls confront the same inexplicable silence from their own corners of the world. Each chapter tests a different version of hope: endurance, denial, faith, and the temptation to give up entirely.