Mark West

Classical, whimsical, racy, Hemingway, Faulkner, Joyce, feminine, etc.

And the machine will do the rest.

Sound familiar?

It's exactly what's happening today with AI.

Every writer today is grappling with what to do about the fact that the act of writing can now be outsourced to artificial intelligence.

My writer friends and I are genuinely terrified that the skill we've spent our lives working on will be completely useless in a few years.

And that's exactly what Dahl was envisioning in his story, written over 70 years ago.

Luckily, we're not quite there yet.

But in a few years, it's pretty easy to imagine that you'll be able to just open the newest AI bot and say, write me a thriller with the structure of Gillian Flynn, the outrageous characters of a Phoebe Waller bridge show, the witty dialogue of Billy Wilder, all in the tone of a dark, rolled doll story.

And in a few seconds, it'll pop out a story that would have taken me a year or more to wrestle out.

Dahl's story is a cautionary tale.

It's the antithesis of what makes his work so memorable, namely his incredibly compelling, unique voice that was mined from years of adventures.

So, as we finish up, this feels like the moment that I'm supposed to opine on Dahl's legacy.

Honestly, the fact that he's still everywhere over 35 years after his death is a legacy in itself.

I started keeping a list of every time Dahl or one of his creations popped up in something random I was watching or reading during the months that I made this show.

The list got too long to keep up with.

Once you start looking for him, you'll find him everywhere.

Whether it's a song lyric, or a politician's speech, or a TikTok about Matilda that has tens of millions of views.

Even if you just looked for Charlie and the Chocolate Factory references, you'd be overwhelmed.

A recent obituary I read in the New York Times for a pizza maker described him as the Willy Wonka of cheese.