Garbage In, Garbage Out

Anyone who has worked in IT for any length of time will have heard the phrase “Garbage in, garbage out.” It was practically a mantra in the 80s and 90s — a reminder that computers aren’t magical, mysterious beings. They don’t “decide” to misbehave. They simply process what they’re given. Feed a system poor data, broken code, or badly structured information, and you’ll get exactly that back out.

And really, isn’t that the perfect description of AI?

Despite the hype, AI isn’t intelligent in its own right. It doesn’t think, reason, or create. It reflects. It imitates. It recombines patterns from whatever it has been trained on. If the training data is unbalanced, low‑quality, or outright wrong, then the output will be too. Garbage in, garbage out — just with shinier packaging.

I’m not here to wade into the wider AI debate, especially in publishing. But I do want to express my view, because readers themselves are starting to notice something important.

Recently on Threads, several readers admitted they’d been wondering why the books recommended to them, often pushed by Amazon’s algorithm, felt flat, uninteresting, and poorly written. They’ve now realised those books were AI‑generated. As authors, we’ve seen KU reads drop, and while no one can say with certainty what’s causing it, the explosion of AI‑written books uploaded in their thousands, often boosted by bots, is undeniably part of the landscape.

Yes, that takes income away from genuine authors. No, it isn’t fair. But here’s what I believe will happen.

Readers are already recognising the slop for what it is. And if AI slop continues to be used to train unregulated AI engines, the quality will only degrade further. Eventually, the output becomes so poor that it collapses under its own weight. That is my expectation — and frankly, my hope.

Calling out or shaming people who use AI for creative work is, in my view, a waste of energy. I have better things to do with my time and brain power: writing my own books, drawn from my own life, my own experience, my own hands. My covers use my own photographs. My first two books were written long before AI was even a concept in everyday conversation. They are human because I am human.

That doesn’t mean I don’t use AI at all. I do — but in ways that support my thinking, not replace it. I use it to spot trends faster, organise information, and occasionally to generate character sketches for social media based on descriptions I wrote years before AI existed. AI can assist, but it cannot originate. It cannot create. And it never will.

Because of that, I don’t feel threatened. I might feel frustrated when readers fall for AI slop and deprive real authors of income, or when algorithms push quantity over quality. But AI can’t write my books — not the DI Matthew Goodwin Detective Series, and not the Story Behind My Stories nonfiction series. They are built from lived experience, real memories, real careers, real people. Only I can write them.

And that brings me full circle.

I learned about garbage in, garbage out back in the 80s and 90s, and it still holds true today — even if the technology has changed shape. My 37 years in IT produced Connecting Trains, a police procedural set in Surrey with a Major Investigation Team inspired by my own career. I’ve written about that journey in Connecting Trains: How a Career in IT Turned into a Major Investigation Team. That alignment — between life, craft, and creativity — is what makes my work mine.

It’s also exactly what defines the authors I host on The Story Behind My Stories Podcast – The Author Season, returning this week.

Real authors. Real lives. Real stories.

No garbage here.

Have a great week,

Helen x