Let's rip the band-aid off: my earlier work was created with the involvement of AI models, particularly LLMs. Pieces created with the involvement of generative AI systems are marked as such. All these pieces are also grouped in the "scraps" section, where they belong.

For those of you who haven't immediately written me off, please allow me to explain.

I began "writing" (read: playing with LLM systems) in late 2020, early 2021. We all know what state the world was in at the time, and everybody was desperate for some sort of distraction or novelty. At the time, I did not fully appreciate the implications of LLM training methods, namely the requisite trampling of copyright and outright theft of terabytes of text.

For what it's worth, I have never intended to profit off of any of these model products, and I still don't. At the time, I saw my dalliances with these systems as experiments. Were they any good at generating prose? Could they come up with compelling story concepts? I also engaged with these systems in a line-by-line fashion rather than taking in pages at a time. I curated the results aggressively, perhaps even obsessively, retrying potentially over a dozen times to get a single sentence that pleased me. More often than not, I would simply grab the wheel myself and fill out a troublesome line or three. Despite the frustration and tedium, those moments when a model's response seems to "get" your intentions with a scene, or seems to breathe some ersatz life into a character were genuinely something to behold.

Ultimately, as an experiment, as a trial, I was consistently unimpressed. But one one hand I embraced the challenge of working with an underwhelming and distractable "partner" as a sort of exercise. Looking back at my earlier work, I cringe. It's bad. With time and perspective, I don't know how I ever thought it could be anything but. That said, on the other hand I had the persistent fear that my writing style would somehow be identified and linked to my real-world persona. Also a foolish, paranoid delusion, but a factor it still was.

So what now? As for myself, I have wielded the adversary's tools, and found them wanting. Even were they not forged from greed and deception, I would find them dissatisfying. Now fully understanding the animus of spiteful lawlessness that drives their creation, I find them despicable.

Why am I saying all of this? I could easily have scrubbed AI-involved works and scraps, or not disclosed the nature of their creation. But that would have been dishonest, and I feel compelled to transparency. Guilt? Shame? Perhaps. But moreover I think it important that the distinction between hand-crafted prose and what AI calls "prose" be laid bare for all to see. I will leave my AI-marked scraps up as monuments to the inadequacy of LLMs.

Needless to say, I have washed my hands of any LLM tools several years ago, and certainly will never be picking them up again. As of today (April 3, 2025), I am working on a top-to-bottom rewrite of Positive Influence as a sort of penance but also as an opportunity to shine. Val, Lena, and all the other characters in the story wound up taking on lives of their own, herky-jerky and unsteady though they may have been. They deserve better, and I can do better.

I've been thinking deeply about writing and my relationship to creativity in general over the past couple of weeks, and I've come away feeling somehow tainted (and not in a fun way). Nobody has said anything to me about what's on my site, but I just guess that some sort of explanatory disclaimer/disavowal is demanded by my conscience.

If you've made it this far, thank you. By the way, write that fic. Make that doodle. No machine can ever do what you do, I promise.

“What is better, to be born good, or to overcome your evil nature through great effort?”