Is There a Difference Between Producing Words and Producing Value.

Or, How I Almost Became a Billionaire With AI

Yesterday marked the successful completion of my regular monthly mental period.

Please do not assume that “period” and “regular” are synonyms here. They are not.

For years, I have never missed one of these episodes. They arrive and leave with the precision of a Swiss watch. My exhausted mind may not have enough energy to motivate me, organise me, or keep me under control, but if it decides to torture me, it somehow discovers the power output of seventeen nuclear plants.

The three painful days of deep existential crisis before the climax were dominated by one single question.

Not “Who am I?”
Not “What should I do with my life?”

Those questions belong to an earlier stage. They were answered long ago, filed away, and forgotten. I am now dealing with the much more advanced philosophical level:

When?

My youth promised me a bright future, but I am still waiting for delivery.

On one hand, this is encouraging. It means I am still young, and the promised future may simply be delayed.

On the other hand…

Really?

Where exactly is it?

I have already started paying for funeral insurance, but the horizon remains suspiciously dark. Perhaps that famous light at the end of the tunnel is not a sign of hope after all. Perhaps it is the train.

During these moments of profound reflection, I performed the usual rituals. I stared at my bank account, delivered several inspiring speeches to my younger self, wiped away a few bitter tears, sent some carefully chosen insults into the universe, and spent time lying dramatically on my little sofa. No further action was required to achieve maximum misery.

Then, after my brain chemicals completed whatever mysterious internal mixing process they were conducting, a solution appeared.

I would become rich.

Not just rich.

Filthy rich.

Obviously, with minimum effort and maximum efficiency. Because why else would humanity spend so much time inventing shortcuts if not to avoid doing difficult things? We are wonderfully creative creatures.

And nowadays, we have extraordinary tools.

We have generative AI.

I had a brilliant plan.

I would feed AI one of my many unfinished stories, because I have so many ideas that I cannot possibly complete them all, and the machine would transform my forgotten masterpiece into a multimillion-selling novel.

Simple.

Revolutionary.

Almost suspiciously easy.

I opened my computer, made a fresh cup of tea, and poured my latest idea into the keyboard.

My new business partner, whom I decided to call MyMoneyMakingMate, or simply MMMM because apparently even imaginary billionaires need efficient branding, responded with almost three thousand words.

In seconds.

A whole page of my future bestseller was born.

Only 399 pages left.

Perfect.

I would finish the book today and begin selling it the day after tomorrow. Naturally, every hardworking writer deserves a short rest before becoming an overnight success.

The plan was flawless.

The story structure was clear. The characters had their foundations. There were twists ready for flavour. After a couple of hours of prompting, the book was complete.

Being experienced in publishing, I formatted it myself. I created the table of contents. I designed the cover. I made another cup of tea.

Yorkshire tea. The finest drink in the world.

My final cup as a poor man and my first as a billionaire. Or perhaps I should aim higher? Trillionaire has a nice sound to it.

While drinking my ceremonial tea, I listened to the book being read aloud by another AI, whose name I have not yet decided. Listening to a text is one of the best ways to understand the bigger picture.

Yes, I know.

Editing should come first. Formatting should come later.

But when you already have more than 80,000 words sitting beautifully inside a document before your first cup of tea has gone cold, who has time for editing?

Well…

Let me tell you.

I have never, ever heard such magnificent nonsense in my life.

This was not a book.

It was not even a rough draft.

It was an enormous collection of words wearing a costume.

There were chapters without meaningful connections. Characters who changed names, personalities, and responsibilities by Chapter 7. A storyline that moved less like a river and more like an angry ocean during a storm.

Millions of imaginary dollars disappeared instantly.

Still, I remained calm. Forget the trillionaire dream. Forget the billionaire fantasy. A millionaire would be perfectly acceptable.

Time to edit.

Editing.

Do you know what editing really is?

It is the punishment writers receive for having imagination.

It is the long, exhausting process of taking something you created, something you love, and admitting that much of it does not belong there.

Editing 80,000 beautifully formatted words of beautifully formatted nonsense would take weeks, perhaps months.

My imaginary fortune had been reduced from billions to a few hundred. Still technically profitable, if we ignore mathematics.

Then came the real revelation.

Not that I would not become filthy rich.

It was that I suddenly understood something much bigger.

I understood why great books often disappear.

Why brilliant writers struggle to find readers.

Why so many newly published books feel unfinished.

Why people have become attracted to the fantasy of passive income and instant success.

Why we increasingly confuse production with creation.

The experiment did not shock me because it failed. It shocked me because it came dangerously close to appearing successful.

That is the trap.

If I had never written before, or if I had only read a handful of books, I might have believed I had created a novel.

The chapters had titles.

The paragraphs were grammatical.

The dialogue sounded convincing.

The document contained eighty thousand words.

It looked like a book. But it was not.

It was the literary equivalent of a beautiful showroom house: walls, windows, furniture, flowers in a vase…

and no foundations.

That is the misunderstanding behind many claims:

“I wrote a book with AI in two weeks.”

No.

AI did not create a coherent book.

It created text.

A book is something else entirely.

A book has architecture. It remembers what happened two hundred pages earlier. It develops ideas instead of simply introducing them. Characters grow, change, and reveal themselves. They do not behave like temporary employees who forget their own names halfway through the seventh chapter.

A book has rhythm.

Restraint.

Purpose.

And above all, it has a voice.

The author’s voice.

Your voice.

No machine can discover that for you because it does not know what it feels like to be you.

AI can imitate styles. It can generate possibilities. It can save enormous amounts of research time. It can improve sentences, suggest structures, challenge ideas, and occasionally remind you that you somehow gave your detective three different eye colours.

That is extraordinary.

But it does not remove the author’s responsibility.

The thinking remains yours.

The choices remain yours.

The taste remains yours.

The responsibility remains yours.

AI may be the greatest writing assistant ever invented.

Yet, it is not the writer.

And here comes the beautiful irony.

The easier it becomes to create words, the more valuable judgement becomes. In a world drowning in text, the rarest skill is no longer writing quickly. It is knowing what deserves to remain on the page. This is the part nobody wants to hear.

You can have thousands of words.

You can love every single one.

You can treat them like your literary children.

Then comes the painful responsibility.

You must remove the ones that do not serve the book. You must cut the beautiful paragraph that leads nowhere. The clever sentence that destroys the rhythm. The fascinating character who has no purpose. The brilliant idea that you love more than the reader ever could.

Not because those words are bad.

Because the book is more important than the words.

Let AI brainstorm. Let it summarise. Let it challenge you. Let it organise, criticise, and occasionally surprise you.

Then do the one thing it cannot do.

Choose.

And you write the book.

P.S.

We have already started using AI in everyday communication. Look through emails, messages, and social media posts. The strange thing is that we are beginning to sound increasingly similar.

Perhaps the next great human skill will not be creating more words.

Perhaps it will be remembering how to sound like ourselves.