I wasn't sure whether to post anything or not, but it's been gnawing at me, and I figure it's high time I said something about it, even if it's not good news. In early October, a friend of mine showed me this "wonderful" new AI tool they'd come across, and it was all of my worst fears come true. You feed it a prompt, a style, a page count, and boom- it spits out what you tell it to. The friend knows I'm a hobby writer (though probably not that I write a lot of adult niche fetish fiction) and thought they were being helpful. In a word, it was crushing to see a machine replace creatives in real time. I had to sate my curiosity to see how far down it went, so on my own I fed the same program a prompt, asking it to write something in MY (Captain Howard Webb's) style. While my body of work isn't as exhaustive as the prompts it's accustomed to, there was clearly enough in its database that it did it without any issue. The kicker? The short story it spat out was objectively pretty good. It wasn't perfect and could use a few edits, but I won't lie and pretend that it didn't produce a perfectly serviceable story that wouldn't appear out of place among my other works. A machine did in seconds what takes me weeks to write, and then months to years to edit and agonize over to get it just right, and I'm still reeling. I guess I always figured that AI would get to this point eventually, but I didn't think it would get here so soon, or that its takeover would be so thorough. That it's victory would be so complete.

I've been holding off posting things for a while as I've been on the hunt for someplace on the internet to post my stuff where AI isn't the dominant or rising force, but I'm now rather doubtful that such a place even exists anymore. With tools like this getting exponentially better all the time, and the whole of the internet fair game for scrapers, there's nowhere to run from it that I know of. Anything I might post would just get swallowed up by some AI bot and fed back into the machine making it even better at what it's doing. If what I can create and what a machine can make are effectively the same thing in the eyes of a prospective reader, then what's the point of posting anything I've actually written at all? At best, I'm training data for the next iteration of some tech bro's LLM foundation, and at worst I'm totally obsolete. I'll readily admit I don't know what to do from here.

To soften this a bit, I'm not going to stop writing. I enjoy it, as torturous as I make it for myself sometimes. I still hope that there is still some way that someday I can share what I've made with humans who might just enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed making it. As a much better writer than I once wrote, "That darkness exists now does not concede that it will last forever, even if the light seems very far away."

TL;DR, I haven't posted for a while. Given the state of things, I probably won't be posting anything in the foreseeable future. When that changes (it will as all things do) you'll hear about it here.

Thanks for reading, and take care my friends.

-Webb