You won’t find any use of GenAI or agentic AI on this site. That’s deliberate: I write compulsively, as a coping mechanism, as a way to process my own thoughts. Letting some sycophantic computer program make words for me is antithetical to why I value writing in the first place.
To be a writer, ultimately, is to be a person who writes words. That’s it. You can be a hobbyist writer, a professional writer, a technical writer, a creative writer, on and on. Maybe you get paid for the writing, maybe you don’t. The main theme is that you *write*. Giving over your ideas to a machine made up entirely of other peoples’ parts is not writing, it’s mimicry.
If you can’t be bothered to put energy and effort into the words you write, you cannot possibly ask someone else to read them. That’s the social contract of written communication; we are making an exchange right here, right now, as you read this. I have made these words appear in this sequence, and you are taking the time to see them, to digest them. I could never ask someone to do that if the words weren’t mine, if I haven’t extracted them from my own brain and deliberated over their use. AI-made words are the literary equivalent of eating packing peanuts – you could, I suppose, but what the fuck are you supposed to get out of that?
Because here’s the thing: I *like* writing. Not just the object, though there is some satisfaction to looking back and seeing I’ve spat out some 70,000 words in a neat line, enough that my printer would eat a ream of paper to make them live in the physical world; I like the act of writing, of running my hand over an idea or an image in my head and then doing my best to describe it. I’ve written words that no one else will ever see because I murdered them, took them from their flock and discarded them. They were still mine, I still made them. I’ve struggled to get description just right, to find something that fits the palate. The struggle is the point, the burst of inspiration is the point. The times where I knew they weren’t perfect but I could come back and fix them once I had a better view of the whole thing? That’s the point.
Where are you supposed to get that from a thing that can’t figure out how many “r”s there are in “strawberry?” Where is the thrill of trying a word that doesn’t seem like it will fit but then it does, it does! How are you supposed to take pride in a thing a toaster made?
If that’s not for you, if you think there’s originality to be had in text made of someone else’s labor, if I’ve hurt your feelings, then that’s alright, I guess. There are a lot of websites out here, go see if someone else has something for you.
But if you’re interested in seeing more, in sticking around, well. We have such sights to show you.