This week I was replaced by AI. I saw it coming, but it didn't make the news any easier to deal with. To be honest, it terrifies me for the future of our species.

I am a writer. Not only that, I am a commercially successful one. Although you probably haven't heard of me, I've published more than 300 short stories in women's magazines over the past 15 years. From ghost stories in Woman's Weekly to tales of romance in Take a Break Fiction Feast, I write them all. Sorry — wrote.

"Dear Geoff," the email said. "Going forward, our in-house team will be using AI tools to compile future editions, but we thank you for your many contributions to the magazine over the years. Kind regards, Rebecca." Or to put it more bluntly: "We've replaced you with a robot."

I enjoyed writing all my stories. Sure, they were not exactly high art. I never expected a call from the Pulitzer panel. But coming up with characters, throwing them into difficult situations and seeing how they coped, writing dialogue that felt real, inventing satisfying-yet-believable twists — was all fun to write and, I hope, fun to read.

So I began typing my reply to Rebecca. I hadn't even finished the first sentence when the truth occurred to me: Rebecca doesn't exist. If a women's magazine no longer needs writers, why does it need an "in-house team"? A vision rose in my mind of someone arriving at an office in the morning, switching on a computer, then going home again while the computer produced a magazine.

The end of my career didn't surprise me, because three things told me this was coming. The first was when my dad died two years ago. At the small gathering in my mum's garden, nobody could think of anything to say. I gave ChatGPT a few prompts to write a poem. Within a few seconds I was reading out "A West Ham Fan," a poem filled with humour and pathos. It was good.

The second thing was a song in my YouTube feed: "Pocket of his Raincoat," supposedly by Paul McCartney — a Beatles ballad with wonderfully esoteric lyrics and a haunting melody. I love the Beatles and here was a song up there with "Yesterday." Then I noticed the performer: the AI Beatles. I was listening to a machine.

And the third thing. A few months ago, as an experiment, I prompted ChatGPT to write me a story I could sell: "Make it 700 words long, a love story, humorous, with an unexpected and emotionally satisfying ending." The story immediately began scrolling out — funny and as good as any I have ever written. It has sat on my computer ever since, an unsubmitted harbinger of the end of human story-telling.

The unavoidable consequence of ever-improving AI is nothing less than the end of all human creativity. Who is going to spend the years of study and practice required to produce something that can be churned out by a computer in seconds? Even if an artist doesn't use AI, who is going to believe them? In a world where music, art and literature can be made by machine, everyone will assume it was made by machine.

Black or white, male or female, straight or gay — there will be no jobs left in the arts for anyone.