So this is the first post of my blog, written by hand in the year 2025–a time when walls of text can be generated in a second, by anyone anywhere.
Hear me out.
Things online are about to get even hairier. We will trust things (articles, images, avatars) less and less, including now video. Bots have all but taken over social media even before things like ChatGPT became all pervasive…so much so I think social media as we know it will soon also become more and more of a shell. Thanks to LLMs, bots are getting smarter and smarter, and the internet and socials even more schloppy, more botty.
It will happen everywhere. Emails are going to become perfect, chat bots will basically be (and already are..) just ChatGPT being as vanilla as corporate communication guidelines can make it. The easiest and most frictionless way possible will always be taken.
Recently some writers-slash-authors got caught leaving prompts in the finished books, showing how quickly we can become incentivized to use these tools. These people themselves could not even be bothered to read the finished work they were asking others to pay to read.
Trust in these authors are dead. That non-trust will rub off on everything surrounding it. (Did you know Amazon laughably caps the amount of books anybody can publish at 3? Per day..!?)
So what’s going to happen in the next years?
I think we will continue to want to have good books, though. Good stories. Fun and interesting fiction created by humans with real and unique angles and strange voices. We will look out for those writers and novelists. We will have to vet them somehow. We will make sure they are real. We will make sure they are our people. I mean, it’s not as if only LLMs can write shitty fiction.
I don’t know how this will shape the world or our buying habits, I’m also figuring this all out. But I think we will revert a bit, to something more personal again. One thing I am toying with (and I am still trying to figure out if it is creepy or not), is asking for a mobile number when someone subscribes to my newsletter. Meaning I might might call up new subscribers, like a boomer. Another idea would be to have some kind of telegram group or channel going, like a…xennial? I don’t know.
I do know I have worked very long and very hard to develop the stories and books I am soon to release into the world. Sans LLM. With biological intelligence. And I need to find a readership. And to have a readership, I am convinced that readers will attach more and more to real persons. This is you attaching to me. Metaphorically.
So this is my attempt at a start. And so here’s my blog, existing not in spite of LLMs and generative AI, but because of all of it. It still needs some paint here and there, some furniture, but I made it.
To show you are reading a human author novelist.
Totally feeling this. Writing is becoming a lost art—between AI, autocorrect, and suggested everything, it’s like we’re outsourcing our own voices. Kids don’t even learn proper handwriting anymore, and everyone’s messages are starting to sound the same: polished, perfect, and painfully bland.
I’m no novelist, but I am a storyteller—and I’d take messy, honest human writing over AI-generated perfection any day. There’s something magical in those weird little turns of phrase and imperfect thoughts that remind you there’s a real person behind the words.
And it’s not just writing. As a photographer, I’ve seen visual storytelling take a similar hit. With AI tools making it easier than ever to enhance, alter, or completely fabricate images, it’s becoming harder to trust what we see. Photos that once held a kind of truth are now easily twisted into polished fiction—and yet they’re still presented as reality. It’s unsettling, and honestly, kind of sad.
Your point about vetting writers really hits home—we’ll need that radar for authenticity more than ever. I’ll always show up for strange, brilliant, human storytelling, whether it’s on the page or through a lens. Looking forward to reading more from real voices like yours!
You write : “There’s something magical in those weird little turns of phrase and imperfect thoughts that remind you there’s a real person behind the words.” –> that is exactly it, and I think we will become more sensitive to this kind of thing–recognizing GPU from camera.
To me as creator of stories, the magic in finding that serendipitous idea (maybe because a unapologetic weirdo just walks into the bakery at the same time as myself…which sparks an idea which solves a cool story problem or maybe leads to a perfect joke between characters) is a real kick in itself. As a photographer, I am sure you can relate exactly to this; Seeing the opportunity in unexpected stuff and people around you, seeing those unexpected perspectives on things. These are not things you can imagine in advance in order to shape into some kind of a prompt. It is the creator that sees the opportunity in the moment, and then chooses (or not) to take advantage of that in shaping or creating a bigger work.
But I remain optimistic. For all of us. This point, this thing about shaping a creative work through iteration and through taking advantage of opportunities and situations as they are, is something I think many people underestimate. An idea for a book or a story or a photo or a set piece or a painting or a piece of musical composition does not exist whole cloth in one single idea. An idea that can be shaped into a one paragraph prompt and then spat out on the other side of some generative-AI-du-jour.
This commoditization of difficult-to-create “art” will force us all into a place where we create stuff that have never been done before and truly our own. Whether this is for portrait photography that only Benita could have made, or genre fiction only Aubrey could have written.
I expect we will have plenty to say about this still. Millennials have been in for a wild ride so far..
Maybe it’s time for the typewriter to make a comeback !
😁 haha no maybe that’s a bit too far back!