In partnership with
Did you know that poor Zuckerberg couldn't pay me or any other author because it would be "unreasonably expensive" to train Meta AI on licensed work? That poor little company worth a measly one and a half trillion dollars couldn't spend 3 dollars on a book.
All of my books are in the training data, plus my research papers. Hop over to LibGen and check if your favorite authors got the same treatment. Spoiler alert: they did, 100%.
But I'm not losing sleep over this. Getting angry about wealthy corporations stealing from poor people is about as productive as complaining about the weather. The rain doesn't care. Zuckerberg doesn't give a single shit. The AI flood is here regardless.
However, we can still do this for fun:
It’s not so much the theft or the slop bothering me, but that people have started to say:
“What’s the point of making art or writing stories when a silicon chip can spit it out in seconds?”
And then I want to shake them until their teeth rattle, because they've got it exactly backwards.
The AI slop is slop precisely because it has no soul.
AI books are stories without wounds.
I’m not saying all AI created content is shit (I’m using AI as my business strategy assistant). There’s poetry, weird humor, and moments where it almost sounds like it understands grief or joy. But all of that exists because it ate Toni Morrison, Ursula K. Le Guin, trans poets, indigenous storytellers, and everyone else who ever dared bleed on paper, and all those little weird books that only sold 10 copies but changed someone’s life.
AI learned to approximate emotions by being fed art by people who actually felt these things.
So what do we do about it?
We give no shits and make more art!
Will we ever out-compete the AI flood? Nope, not in volume. But the flood is irrelevant. We're not producing content.
We're making the thing that only we can make.
And that requires a shift in how we judge our own art. There’s no "Is it good enough?" There’s no "Will it sell?"
There’s only “Was I fucking angry when I started making it, and do I feel awesome now?” and “Did it bring me joy?” and “Would my mom be shocked if she saw it?” and “Does it please my inner goblin?” and definitely “Would it grow like cancer inside me if I hadn’t let it out?”
If yes to any of the above: you made art. Simple as that.
Your inner chaos goblin doesn't care if your story is "marketable." All it cares about is that the teeth of your story are sharp, its fur prickly, and its backend leaving a lasting and real impression.
So here's how you start:
Write yourself a permission slip.
Yep, the real thing, written on an empty toilet paper roll, or a sticky note, or the ceiling of your bedroom. Something like:
"I have permission to write garbage that no one will ever see. I have permission to be shitty at this. I have permission to make something purely because I want to, with no obligation for it to be useful, marketable, or even coherent."
Your inner critic (the asshole that tells you that you're not a "real" writer/artist, that you're wasting your time, that everyone else is better at this) is not your wise leader you have to obey. It's a brain structure (the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, if you want to get technical) doing its job of protecting you from social rejection.
You can thank it for its service and then ignore it completely.
The permission slip is your override code. Try it and see what happens.