There’s a sharp heartache that comes from watching life accelerate faster than your body can heal from trying to make it. The pace keeps climbing, and this aging vessel carrying my faded spirit can’t catch up.

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    I have spent decades learning the craft of writing, often failing so I could improve. Ten to twenty hours a day, always more than six, I have studied the marrow of sentences … just to pull meaning from the quiet and chaos around me. To build stories that I once believed may outlast me.

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    My fingers, forearms, and joints hurt from it every day of my life. There have been nights I pressed frozen vegetables to my wrists and typed with one side while the other goes numb, switched, and repeated the process to keep a flowing page from drying up.

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    This future of mine holds ligament surgery, but I cannot yield. The competition is too great and presses the fight onward as I sleep; and there will be no bell to save me; to save us.

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    My mind turns after midnight. Insomnia…

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    The desire to succeed forces me to drag another thought across the coals until it takes shape. Only then can I get a sparse three or four hours of sleep and wake and punish my tendons again.

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    Now, I am watching programs do the same labor in seconds.

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    AI is still a baby but already creates books, scripts, and long videos faster than any person can blink. Some of it is bad; some is surprisingly potent. Not great. Not extraordinary. But convincing enough to fill each feed, countless scrolls, and every corner of what was once called imagination.

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    All this while we watch a baby AI that will live forever take its very first steps.

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    That is our new rival as authors. Not another writer sweating through the night. Not someone else burning years of their lives away chasing the same dream. It is a line of code that never tires and never questions itself.

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    It’s not that AI surpasses us, at least not yet, but it will, and it will soon. The machine will eventually bury those who give their finite hours to this calling beneath a mountain of work that’s just “good enough.”

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    Soon, humans with no study, no strain, no seasons of trial, and no love for the process will whisper a few sentences into a generator and claim what it produces as their own. As the systems grow smarter, readers will believe it. They’ll see synthetic emotion stitched together, stolen from a billion harvested voices.

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    And the prompters that whispered into the AI’s ear will nod with a proud, world-conquering smile. They’ll say it came from their core. That it was theirs. That they were the minds behind the story.

 

    This is where unease smothers...

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    Because for those of us who have paid for every inch of our growth with effort, pain, and an endurance that will cost us in the end, it feels like robbery. Not as something you can report, but the silent kind. The type that tells you the blood you’ve spilled to become who you are may one day mean nothing.

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    But unease is not the end. It’s proof of being. I can only hope that is enough. I’ll keep writing. I will keep moving forward, but so will AI.

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    My body will force me to sleep while the machine learns and advances. Eventually, it will mock the pain and emotion in my words and stories so well, that the whispering prompters will be indistinguishable from real blood-sweat-and-tears authors. People will say they prefer real world truth over synthetic stories, but they will not know the difference as the years pass. No one will.

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    So, if the masses choose to drown themselves in imitation no longer distinguishable from truth, so be it. For my fans, for myself, I will not yield to it; because someone has to stay above the surface and remember what it feels like to craft. Let the whispering prompters be who they are and hide behind the word tool.

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    Let me be clear. I have no issues against AI as a tool. But let’s not avoid the truth.

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    There is a difference between using a tool and letting it build the house while you sip tea, watching from a picnic table. The truth is, writers have always used tools: pens, keyboards, editors. But a tool helps you build. It does not dream for you, bleed for you, or sign your name when it’s done. What will soon be replacing the art isn’t technology; it’s authorship without authors.

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Your human author,

C. R. BUCHANAN​​

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When Machines Start to Dream | A Reflection by Author C. R. Buchanan