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I have dreamt about being a published author. I have dreamt about being a writer. These have always driven me to write, to produce words, images, concepts, and dreamworlds. From an early age, I have always written things. I have boxes full of stories, always incomplete because I do not know how to sustain ideas, but always in words. My life has always been linked to words. I have published about 10 academic articles, a couple of fiction works (mostly poetry), and I am now busy with hopefully a massive book deal. But I am stuck in a weird situation since the advent of the age of AI. Have words become redundant? Everyday, I see news articles that promote peoples' initiatives to promote work that is free of the use of AI. And I can get behind this, but this is an interesting situation in which we find ourselves. I think AI has become a kind of mirror to our own fallibility, the seduction of words, the seduction of producing too many words. We have always appreciated writing, from wars being fought to protect works, to words leading to wars being fought. The written word has a cult like status since the dawn of humans. But I increasingly find myself feeling a strange redundancy that I have never felt. A few years ago, I challenged myself to post every single day. I wrote about 500 words on average every day. On top of that, I wrote my PhD and other articles. And this was all before the dawn of AI, or at least in my own life. Then everything just changed one day.

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I am still writing poetry, I am trying to write these blog posts, and I am trying to write articles (post my PhD slump). But things just feel *different*. My words are not carrying living worlds any longer, it feels like a necessity to feed the machine. It feels like a slog to write if we can ask machines to create slop at the press of a button. I mean, how can we compete? There will always be those labels on food: organic; free-range; and so on. But are these labels true? We live in the age where these organic stickers will now read: AI-free; Human-made; and so on. We can also question the truth behind these terms. And in the publishing space, there are some high profile scandals of works being published that was AI produced. But what does this even mean? People will still buy products they know are not organic, not free-range. Chickens are raised in shocking conditions, but people will always buy the cheaper eggs irrespective of... Today, people will buy books, poetry, news, WORDS, without thinking twice. People are just like that. And this is something I do not see a lot of people writing about. The absolute strangeness of our life: before AI there was also slop, now, there is also slop, people will not change. But writers, or at least I, have changed. I have seen a clear shift in the way I am thinking and writing. I feel less confident. I feel less the need to write, to produce, in an age of instant slop. I feel that my words have become more scarce, costly, priceless, expensive (insert more adjectives here). In short, it feels like human-produced words are scarcer, and in my own mind, this is a strange shift in my mind: for so long I have tried to produce as much as possible. Now, in the AI-age, this need to produce withered away into something else: to produce something I am proud of. But I have so much still to learn... *All of this is my own writing in the strange age we find ourselves in (questioning everything). The photographs are my own, taken with my Nikon D300.*

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