Anthony Horowitz: I use AI when writing – but it feels like cheating in a school exam

Prolific author Anthony Horowitz uses ChatGPT “all the time” when writing – something he feels “nervous about”.

Horowitz, 71, has been publishing books since the 1980s, and is known for successful children’s spy series Alex Rider, as well as adult novels like Magpie Murders – but the process of writing is slightly different now to what it once was.

“I do use ChatGPT all the time,” he says. “I feel nervous about it, because, is it cheating? I feel a bit like it’s cheating in a school exam.”

When we meet, Horowitz was plotting the next instalment in his Hawthorne and Horowitz series, which follows grizzled detective Hawthorne, narrated by a version of the author himself.

“Before you came in, I asked ChatGPT: ‘Is there an adjective to describe the word of the shape of a potato?'” Horowitz says.

But unfortunately, AI isn’t exactly foolproof, and the answer Horowitz got back was ‘ellipsoid’.

“This is when you drop the artificial intelligence and use your own intelligence – readers hearing that the potato on her plate was ‘ellipsoid’ are going to say, ‘What the hell is this guy talking about?'” he continues.

“It’s useful to have immediate knowledge, but not unrestrained. You’ve always got to judge what you’re being told, and also look for a second source. But in the old days, I’d go to a library, I’d look up stuff in books. What’s the difference between using AI and going straight to the point?”

Horowitz has always been a researcher, and says he would read three to four books for every episode of Foyle’s War, the historical detective drama he created for ITV that ran between 2002 and 2015. This is just scratching the surface of the Richmond-based writer’s career, which has spanned three James Bond novels, two reimaginings of Sherlock Holmes, and several other TV hits, including Midsomer Murders.

He’s currently promoting the sixth Hawthorne and Horowitz book, A Deadly Episode, which gets even more meta than before. It follows the detective and writer duo looking into a murder that happens on a film set – which happens to be shooting the movie adaptation of the first book in the series, 2017’s The Word Is Murder (which, coincidentally, Horowitz is currently writing a screenplay for, although it’s not yet been sold to a production company).

So what is it about the enduring appeal of murder mysteries, which take up so much of Horowitz’s work?

“I put it down to a sense of people needing absolute truth,” Horowitz muses.

“We live in a world in which, because of news and fake news and social media and all the conspiracy theories that surround us now, it’s impossible to know anything.”

He suggests that a “sense of being ill at ease hangs over us all the time”, continuing: “A crime novel, at least, dots the i’s, crosses the t’s and provides you with absolute truth. The killer was this person. These are the clues you should have spotted. This is the reason that he or she did it, and they will be punished.

“That’s also part of it: the sense of justice. We live in a society where justice no longer seems to have a role in our lives… Truth, justice, closure, a community that is healed because the killer has been found and there is no longer any suspicion – these are all very much part of it.”

Not that Horowitz’s books are all doom and gloom, and there’s plenty of humour injected into A Deadly Episode. In fact, Horowitz admits that he regularly makes himself laugh with his own writing, saying: “I guess that comes from spending so much time by myself that I didn’t have anyone else to laugh at my jokes, so I might as well.”

While the series can by no means be described as comedy crime capers (a genre he “hates”), the books in the Hawthorne and Horowitz series have increasingly developed a “lighter side to them” – which could be a reaction to the state of the world right now.

“We’re living in pretty grim and dark times, and everybody has a sense of angst about them,” says Horowitz, who was made a CBE for services to literature in 2022.

Nowadays, Horowitz battles these grim times by reading poetry – something he’s come to “quite late in life”.

“I find it endlessly encouraging and life-enhancing,” he says. “Instead of reading the newspapers in the morning, I’ll read a poem and get out of bed feeling so much healthier.”

Another change he’s made is swearing off social media, after quitting X (formerly known as Twitter) two years ago.

“I am free of all social media and feel so much healthier and better for it – the change is really quite dramatic.”

Horowitz was spurred to give up X after realising he was “disappearing into it” – and that he was finding the algorithm serving him “noticeably more toxic” content, adding: “I closed the whole thing down one New Year’s Eve, and felt better within hours. Total detox.”

Despite writing a trilogy of Bond novels novels (starting with 2015’s Trigger Mortis and ending with With A Mind To Kill in 2022), Horowitz can’t be tempted to reveal which actor he would like to play James Bond next, saying: “I definitely don’t answer that question – I’ve learned from experience it is a rabbit hole not to fall into.”

What he will say is that he thinks it would be a “mistake” to cast a female Bond – particularly as “there is already a female Bond”, referring to Modesty Blaise, the female spy character created by writer Peter O’Donnell in the 1960s.

While Horowitz calls them “terrible books”, they have a “special place in my heart” as they were family favourites when they came out.

Horowitz has recently been revisiting some favourite novels – and not just guilty pleasures, but great works of literature. He and his wife Jill Green, a producer who he frequently collaborates on TV projects with, have recently been rereading the books of Thomas Hardy.

“I’ve reached the age where I’m aware that I will be reading these books now for the last time, and that’s sad – but it’s also very heartening to revisit books I loved when I was younger,” says Horowitz, who shares two grown-up sons with Green.

A Deadly Episode by Anthony Horowitz is published in hardback by Century, priced £22. Available now.