DAGGERS SPEECH

The following is a lightly edited version of a speech I was asked to give at the 2025 Daggers – the prestigious crime fiction awards administered by the Crime Writer’s Association of the UK.

I was invited to give the keynote speech before the awards, but wasn’t given a subject or a brief, other than a rough ten minute time-limit. The topic was completely up to me. Having a completely blank slate felt like a huge honour – and a daunting task. As you’ll see, I chose to talk about the reason we were all gathered there: the bravery and humanity involved in pouring your heart out onto the blank page. I hope you enjoy.

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What a huge honour to be asked to address the audience of the Daggers – a dangerously intelligent grouping of book professionals smart enough to make any speaker wilt, and more importantly with the know-how to kill you in at least six undetectable ways if you bore on for too long.

Because we are, unbelievably, in the year two thousand and twenty five, there is apparently now only one acceptable way to begin an after dinner speech, and that is by feeding the subject you intend to talk about into ChatGPT.

Accordingly, a few weeks ago, I sat down and typed into the ChatGPT search box “write a thought-provoking after dinner speech about the pros and cons of using AI to write books. The audience is a group of crime writers. The speech should be about 10 minutes.” And then, because Vaseem Khan, the outgoing CWA chair, had sounded a bit alarmed when I told him that I’d like to talk about AI, and said something that basically boiled down to “ok, Ruth, if you must, but please make it at least a bit funny”, I added “make it funny.”

Chat GTP promptly produced 875 words (which incidentally is not a ten minute speech at all but closer to five, but let’s not worry about that) that balanced pros, cons, and amusing little asides about kayaking accidents and finished up with a flourishing conclusion. It offered to turn it into a powerpoint but I reminded it I was a writer and therefore had no intention of mastering powerpoint. I read it through, made a few tweaks, printed it out, and… just kidding, I didn’t do any of that.

I actually did put the prompt in, because I’d only used ChatGPT once before, and for the purposes of this talk, I was curious to see what it churned out. But that’s where I stopped. Because the speech it produced was as dull as you’d expect, but more importantly, you didn’t come here tonight to hear the bland and blended platitudes of a thousand think-pieces mashed together. You came to talk to your fellow writers. You came to hear from people whose business it is to smash words together until something meaningful emerges. From people whose own books ended up in the AI training database, every single one of them. And when the Daggers kindly, possibly unwisely, asked me to speak, they asked me as someone who has spent a lifetime trying to understand the ineffable mystery of how it is possible to make someone laugh, cry, think and grieve through nothing more than little black marks on a page.

In short, you came to connect with your fellow human beings.

Because that is what writing is after all. Yes, we talk about craft, and twists, and plot, and character. Yes we’re making a product and playing with expectations and reinventing the wheel, and riffing on the canon, and trying to hit the bestseller list. All of those things are true. Sometimes we might even manage to do one or two of them.

But at its heart, writing is all of those things – and none of them. What it really is, is two human beings, a reader and a writer, connecting. Across time. Across space. Sometimes across death itself. Two human beings who probably have never met, in many cases could never meet. A writer and a reader, each bringing their own lived experiences and joys and griefs and preconceptions and worries to the page – and between them creating something… entertaining. Intriguing. Sometimes frustrating. Always, always magical.

Like many writers in this room, I imagine, I was contacted when the Open AI short story “A machine-shaped hand” came out a few months ago, and asked for my thoughts. The Guardian emailed me a link to the story, and also a link to a piece written by Jeanette Winterson in which she praised the story as “beautiful and moving”, and said it was “time to read AI.”

She may be right. But, like many things it’s time for me to do, including cutting back the roses, giving up sugar, and winding up this speech in an expeditious manner, I will not be doing it. I did read the story however, and I drafted a reply to the Guardian – but I didn’t send it. I don’t know why I didn’t. Perhaps because what I felt was tangled and complicated and full of an anger I hadn’t fully processed about the use of my own pirated books to power a machine that will ultimately, definitely put people out of work – albeit probably not many of us in this room. Perhaps because the reply I wrote ended up quite long and I didn’t know how much of it would be used, and whether people would understand what I was trying to say out of context.

I think mainly though, I didn’t want yet more of my words – my human words – to go into feeding and publicising a machine that had already swallowed up so many of my books. But I will tell you what I wrote. What I was trying to say. What I didn’t send.

This is what I wrote.

Open AI’s new short story is undoubtedly impressive – rich in odd imagery and interesting quirks of phrase – but setting aside the obvious objections (both to the limits of the story itself and the ethics of the business model it sprang from), I think it fundamentally misses the point of writing – why as human beings we write, and why we read.

Writing is, at its best, a dance between the reader and the writer – my humanity speaking to your humanity, my grief illuminating yours, my experiences twining with your experiences to create something bigger and more meaningful than either of us could have created alone. When I write I am thinking about you, the reader, putting myself in your shoes, trying to guess what you want, how long I can tease that out, how far I can surprise you and delight you. And when I read, I am doing the same – I’m thinking about what the writer must have had in their heart when they created this thing, what their intention was, how brave they were in trying to accomplish it. To put your heart on the page is a brave thing. But when I read this story, I know that there is no bravery there. There is no person to understand.

We read, fundamentally, to connect with another soul. But when I read this story, I know I am alone and that someone calling into the dark, trying to connect, can be fooled by an echo of their own voice, but that’s all it is – an echo.

Look. ChatGPT and other machine learning models are here to stay. I have no doubt about that. And there will probably come a day when AI is better at detecting cancer on a mammogram than your doctor, better at detecting road hazards than the average taxi driver, better at helping you sort out your malfunctioning computer than the Dell online helpdesk.

But it will never change a nappy. It will never comfort a crying child. It will never dress a wound or hold the hand of your dying father as the light goes out of his eyes in a hospice bed at two in the morning on a soft autumn night.

None of those jobs are well paid. Often they aren’t paid at all. But they are also the most important roles in our society – the tasks for which there is no substitute, can never be a substitute. They are the times where one human, grieving, loving, hurting, hoping, reaches out for another, and finds a connection.

And our books are one of the places where that connection happens.

As I said, in the letter to the Guardian that I never sent, to put your heart on the page, your flawed, imperfect, human heart – that is a brave thing. And we are here tonight to applaud that bravery – the bravery of all the shortlisted and longlisted and winning authors, the bravery of everyone who puts their heart out there, trying to connect with another human, letting themselves be judged. To do that, is a scary, scary thing. But it is also one of the most important things in the world. So please, for all our sakes, keep on being brave. And thank you.