I write my blog for two people, you and me. I did not, however, write it for the one thousand three hundred bots who are currently eating my site alive. Hosted mainly in Singapore and China. They are like an army of the undead, unstoppable, and they are after my brains.

It took them about six months to find the blog, and once they did, they have been feasting on my words. Every day, they return, training, learning, and trying to be like me and trying to replicate me, feeding a corpus on the corpse of my life.

Now, I have an uncanny knack for being in the right job at exactly the wrong time. I watched open-mouthed as the golden age of photojournalism was eviscerated by the digital camera, then gasped from the newsroom as journalism had its heart torn out by its nemesis, the internet, all struck down by the curse of good enough. Now, with the advent of AI and LLMs, I don’t have the breath left to scream.

I live in a dystopian version of my future I never considered, and I’m not battling robots but a mindset enabled by them, in this case, AI. The problem is that AI does not need to be better than me; it does not even need to be as good, it just needs to be free, or at least feel like it.

The concepts that once drove the creative world have been reordered and reimagined. The idea that quality would be the prime mover has vanished in a puff of logic, so dense that it has obscured the damage. AI only has to be good enough, and if good enough is free, it’s good enough.

It sounds so innocuous, but it’s every bit as world-shattering as the theory of relativity that led to the atomic bomb. It doesn’t have to beat you; it just has to be good enough, good enough for someone with a budget and a deadline. That’s the economic logic that ends careers and destroys your world.

Almost 62 and still working in journalism makes me something of a survivor. Forty years of getting on with it, and while not rich in the conventional sense, I’m a millionaire in experience and possess a wisdom born of age and life.

To the LLMs and the bots, my blog, the manifestation of my life, is just training data, free content, to be scraped at will as the machine learns to be me. It’s as fucking terrifying as “Invasion of the Bodysnatchers”.

The irony, the more I write my blog, hoping for more work as a writer, the more I dig my professional grave, as that content is scraped without my consent, used without any compensation, and ends up competing against me, all because it’s good enough and it’s free.

Four redundancies, stress and worse, an endowment mortgage shortfall, COVID wiping out my savings. Cashing in the pension to keep the house. But I’m still here. Still standing. Battered and bruised, yet I’m still writing. You see, free was never free; it came at a cost. Nothing in life is free.

But that is a writer’s burden, and that is why I write, for you, and for me, yet it’s become such a heavy load carrying all those free passengers and knowing that in doing so I am killing myself.