Retired firefighter Damon Smith’s first book A I E S Artificial Intelligence Evolving Species, is meant to be a fictional adventure with a dose of reality. The reality for Mr Smith is that AI is evolving so quickly that soon we will be working for the robots and not vice versa. “AI will soon be giving us menial tasks to do, because AI can do most things better than we can,” he said.

In the book, terminal cancer has forced the main character, also called Damon Smith, to confront two enemies, his own mortality and a rebellion forming within in the company he built.

A carefully organised mutiny is under way, designed to strip him of control.

Mr Smith, the fictional version, turns to AI to help him save his company. Information becomes the most dangerous weapon of all.

The book has the names of two authors on the cover, his own and that of Eugene Smith.

Eugene Smith is not a human, but the name of a bot in his book about corporate espionage, and also the name he has given to his co-writer — artificial intelligence.

He used an AI writing programme to craft around 10 per cent of the book.

“I wanted to write a book for years,” Mr Smith said, “but my grammar and spelling were not great. I did not think I had it in me.”

It was not until he retired from the Bermuda Fire Service after 23 years that he thought of writing again.

“I took on another job managing the warehouse at a local tech company,” he said. “I had more time to think about what I wanted to do.”

He started writing but the first draft of his book was less than 60 pages when he was aiming more for 200.

“I really did not know how to write a book,” Mr Smith said. “I am the kind of person who looks for someone else who knows, when I do not know how to do something myself.”

Try as he might though, he could not find anyone he knew who could sufficiently answer his questions about book writing.

Instead, he turned to AI to help him. Through YouTube he discovered an AI writing tool called Novel Crafter.

“It had a steep learning curve,” Mr Smith said. “I watched more videos about it, but still did not quite understand.”

In the end, he signed up for a 21-day online course in using the app.

“They got to the third lesson and said OK, now you are going to start writing your book,” he said.

Dutifully, he started to write another book, but put it aside because he really wanted to finish the first one.

“I had my word document minimised on my computer,” he said. “I would highlight maybe two pages and then copy and paste them into Novel Crafter.”

Novel Crafter would point out grammar and spelling mistakes. If he became stuck, it also has a function that uses AI to expand the story.

“It did not delete what I had written, but it added content,” he said.

Often, he would erase AI’s input, but he found the process inspiring. It gave him a fresh ideas about where the story was going.

On the other hand, he also found that the AI app was not perfect. It made mistakes.

Once, it completely changed the names of his characters, at random and he had to spend time changing everything back.

He acknowledged that some people would downplay his writing the book because he used AI.

“I needed more content and some help, but I did write a whole book,” he said. “There are so many things in life that people never really created, but they get credited for. I'm acknowledging that I used AI, but I also want to be credited for what I did do.”

He pointed to other books such as Donald Trump’s Art of the Deal — a bestseller when it came out in 1987.

“Trump did not write that,” Mr Smith said. “He had a ghostwriter write it for him. Likewise, Elon Musk is credited for founding Tesla, but he did not start the company or come up with the ideas behind it.”

Tesla was founded in 2003 by Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning. Mr Musk did not become involved until the next year.

Although it explores future implications of AI Mr Smith it is not meant to be overly technical.

“I wrote it for people looking to read something adventurous,” he said. “AI is a topic that is ubiquitous. People are starting to hear so much about it, I thought maybe they will read about it.”

There are things in the book that he feels will come to fruition.

“It is starting already with robotics replacing people in the workforce,” he said.

That has not stopped him from learning as much as he can about AI and how to use it. He is now exploring how to make AI videos.

“I give it four or five years from now, maybe even less, and you will not know what was written by AI and what was written by a human,” Mr Smith said.

He pointed to the recent success of a country song written and sung by AI.

Last November, a song generated entirely by AI, Walk My Walk hit No. 1 on Billboard’s Country Digital Song Sales chart.

• A I E S is now available on Amazon.com under the name Damon E. Smith. He is working on getting it sold in local bookstores.