loading . . . The Colonization of Confidence. There's a texture to grief very few examine. People talk about the loud griefβthe kind of grief that shatters your soul and rattles your cage of willβbut there's another kind of grief that's rarely explored. Watching and listening to your friends losing who they are.
I think the climate is foreshadowing for my life. The bitter cold of the winter is a warning sign I don't pay attention to as I sip hot herbal tea at my writing desk, vanquishing my writers block and attempting to put some literary order back into the chaotic rhythm of my thoughts.
A phone notification shakes me out of my thoughts about how I can stretch out two men taking their clothes off for about five hundred words. It's Leo. He's texted me.
"Hey Rob," he says, "Did you forget about the writing group today?"
I did, but I can't tell him that.
"Nope! Just getting ready!"
When he makes it to my apartment, there's an email notification from my phone. I don't have time to read it at the moment, and oh, I am a fool for not stopping to check what that email is.
* * *
The air in the conference space where our "Writers of the Future" group meets always smells of harsh cologne and performative productivity. It is a sensory assault of laptop fans and the frantic tapping of laptop keys. I sit in the corner, my cane hooked over the back of my chair, listening to the room.
I hate the name. Writers of the Future sounds like a corporate slogan for a pesticide company, but the name is less important than the people within it, and that's why I'm here.
Leo sits next to me. I can hear the nervous rhythm of his breathing. Leo is a Black writer with a voice that sounds like jazzβunpredictable, syncopated, full of unexpected dissonances that resolve into heartbreaking chords. He writes about his life, the specific, humid weight of a Texas summer, the way joy can taste like a cheap freeze-pop on a Tuesday.
"I have something new," Leo says. His voice is tight. "But... it's rough. It's really messy."
"Messy is good," I say, leaning in. "Messy is where the blood is."
Leo is a writer of immense, jagged power. He is a powerful man with a voice that sounds like gravel crunching under heavy tires, deep and resonant and full of a history that refuses to be smoothed over. When he reads his work aloud, the air in the room changes pressure. His prose is not "clean." It does not flow like water; it flows like molasses, thick and sweet and slow, or sometimes like lava, burning everything it touches. He tells more than he shows, a stylistic choice that critics hate but which I find profoundly honest. He doesn't invite you to watch; he commands you to listen.
and I love everything he writes.
Today, the writers in this group aren't buzzing with typing. They're listening to Chad, a white tech bro that sounds like his larynx is constantly massaging his speech for a pamphlet instead of talking to people.
Chad isn't a writer. He's a content generator. He's published 400 generated books on Amazon and won't stopβnot to mentionβthe insessant bragging he does about how he's a better writer because of whatever LLM he's using today. He is the kind of person who listens to podcasts at 2.5x speed because he believes silence is an inefficiency to be eliminated. He works in "Prompt Engineering," a job title that sounds to me like "Assembly Line Foreman for the Dream Factory."
Chad's voice is smooth, frictionless, possessing the terrifying cheerfulness of a customer service bot that cannot be turned off. "Claude just released an update. It's incredible for unblocking. It really smooths out the edges."
He's explaining to the group how to get the most out of large language models. Leo, beside me, is fidgeting with as much annoyance as I am. We're both immensely relieved when Brad finally claps his hands together, as if he's about to announce a press release.
"Okay," says Brad. Brad is the organizer. His voice is a rich, polished baritone that vibrates in his throat but never seems to reach his chest. It's the voice of a podcast host who sells mattresses between segments on mindfulness. "Leo, you're up. Did you bring the revision of _The Asphalt Hymn_?"
"Yeah," Leo says,
"Great! Alright, creators," Brad announces. The word 'creators' sounds slippery in his mouth, like he's selling a subscription service. "Let's optimize the workflow tonight. Who's ready to output?"
I have to suppress the urge to violently groan about his word choice. Instead, I turn my head towards Leo. I can't wait to hear this.
Leo reads. It's a piece about his grandmother's kitchen. He describes the smell of collard greens as _a heavy, green blanket that wrestled the air into submission._ He describes her laugh as _a rusted hinge that still worked perfectly._
It is beautiful. It is jagged. It stops me cold.
When he finishes, there is a silence. Not the reverent silence of a shared emotional impact, but the uncomfortable, shifting silence of a boardroom that has just been shown a graph with a downward trend.
"It's... interesting," Chad says. "But the pacing is a little weird. And that metaphor about the hinge? It kind of pulls you out of the immersion. It's not very smooth."
"It's not supposed to be smooth," I snap. "It's supposed to be true."
"Leo," Chad says, choosing to ignore me entirelyβhe hates me just as much as I hate himβand addresses Leo directly. "Leo, did you read what I sent before this meeting? I took your last draft and ran it through Claud."
The fuck? I roar internally.
"I asked it to optimize for flow and readability. Listen to this."
Chad clears his throat. The sound is grating. It sounds as if he's optimizing how to speak to humans. He reads from his screen.
_"Her laugh was a joyous sound, ringing through the house like a silver bell. The kitchen always smelled delicious, the aroma of greens filling the air like a warm hug."_
The words hang in the air like dead flies. They are perfectly grammatical. They are perfectly structured. And they are completely, utterly stripped of everything that is Leo. A silver bell? A warm hug? It is the language of a Hallmark card Leo would never write written by a sociopath.
"See?" Chad says, triumphant. "It just flows better. It's more... accessible. You should maybe use that as a base, Leo. Clean up your edges."
I wait for the room to revolt. I wait for the other writers to laugh Chad out of the shop. But they don't.
"Actually," says Amber, a poet who used to write searing verse about heartbreak, "that does sound a lot more professional, Leo. The 'silver bell' image is really classic."
"Yeah," says Mike. "It's less... abrasive."
I feel Leo shrink beside me. I can sense the physical collapse of his posture, the way he folds in on himself.
"I guess," Leo whispers. "I guess I was trying too hard with the hinge."
"No," I say, and my voice is the low growl of a guard dog. "The hinge was perfect. The bell is a lie. Leo, that machine didn't improve your writing. It erased your grandmother."
"You're just resistant to the tools, Robert," Chad sighs. "It's the future. Adapt or die."
"Oh, go power down somewhere. This isn't adaptation," I say, gripping the edge of the table until my knuckles ache. "It's lobotomy."
Nobody agrees with me, though. I am outcast in a gaggle of readers and writers that seem to prefer LLM writing to the jagged edges.
"And this is why," Chad practically yells, "why you don't listen to Luddites! Work smarter, not harder," Chad beams. The smile in his voice is audible, a stretching of wet skin. "That's the future. Why churn butter when you can buy margarine, right?"
I sit there, gripping my cane until my knuckles pop, feeling the beginning of a horror story that has nothing to do with ghosts and everything to do with the slow, methodical erasure of a human soul.
* * *
## Part 2.
I walk home, my cane tapping a furious rhythm against the concrete.
I fucking hate them.
I fucking hate the Tech Bros. I hate the venture capitalists in their Patagonia vests who talk about "disruption" while they burn down the library of human experience. I hate them with the specific, intricate hatred of a survivor who knows exactly how the grift works.
I hate LLMs. My hatred knows no bounds. I love the small web, the clean web. I hate tech bloat.
And LLMs are the ultimate bloat.
They didn't build these things to help us. I know this.
Why do LLMs exist? They say it's to "democratize creativity." Bullshit. You don't democratize creativity by automating the act of creation. You democratize it by funding arts education, by supporting libraries, by paying writers a living wage.
No, they created LLMs to solve a supply chain problem.
The "problem" was that creating contentβreal, human, meaningful writingβis slow. It is expensive. It is unpredictable. And it is diverse. It requires dealing with _people_. People with traumas, people with political opinions, people with voices that don't fit into a corporate style guide. Minority writers, specifically, are "high friction." We talk about queerness and transphobia and racism, and We talk about disability. We make the advertisers uncomfortable.
So the Tech Bros, in their infinite mediocrity, decided to bypass the human element entirely. They built a machine that scrapes our workβour pain, our joy, our very soulsβwithout consent, grinds it into a mathematical slurry, and extrudes it as a flavorless, inoffensive paste that can be sold by the bucket.
They built a machine to gentrify the English language.
and the horror of watching my friend lose his soul almost eats me alive.
* * *
The next week, Leo brings a draft that was written 90% by him. The justifications are quiet, unsure of his own skill.
The week after, he brings a piece that's written 50% by him. The shame is palpable, but it hurts me even more when readers and writers say the LLM versions are always better than his old drafts.
This week, he stuns us all.
"I don'tβI don't have a draft," he admits. I immediately take his hand among the gaping and gawking of the room. His skin feels like it's a hallow shell of his soul. His voice is strained, broken, like there's something that's fundamentally shattering inside him nobody can see.
"I justβI justβI haven't written in a while," he says. Claude has been down. I tried to write somethingβ¦ and, andβ¦ it justβ¦ I can't write. I ain't got nothin'."
Chad chooses that exact moment to colonize the conversation.
"Leo sent me his last draft," Chad announces.
I freeze. NO!
"And," Chad continues, "I ran it through the new 'Literary Fiction' AI I've been working on. Listen to the difference."
He reads Leo's original sentence. I know it is Leo's because it has teeth.
and then, he gets to the LLM version.
The group murmurs. "Oh, that flows so much better," someone says. "It's more... universal."
"Universal means average," I snap, wishing I could get away with prompt engineering Chad's stupid LLM to self destruct. "It means it touches no one because it tries to touch everyone."
"Robert," Chad sighs. "Always the contrarian. Look, the metrics don't lie. Readers prefer the second one. We did A/B testing on Wattpad. The second one had a 40% higher retention rate."
"You are feeding them sludge," I say, my voice rising. "And because they are starving, they eat it. And then you tell them sludge is what food tastes like."
"It's just writing, Rob," Chad says, his voice hardening. "Why do you have to make it a crusade? Leo likes it. Don't you, Leo?"
We all turn to Leo. Even though I can't see his face, I feel the weight of the room pivot toward him.
"I..." Leo's voice cracks. A dry, brittle sound. "I don't know."
"Leo," I say gently. "Tell him you are a good writer that doesn't need fixing."
"It's better," Leo whispers.
The words hit me like a physical blow. A kick to the shin.
"What?" I ask.
"It's better," Leo says, louder this time, but with a hysterical edge, a vibration of pure panic. "He's right, Rob. My metaphors... they're confusing. People don't get them. The machine... it makes me sound smart. It makes me sound like a _real_ writer."
"You don't need an LLM to write for you. You're a good writer," I say, but his voice cracks as he stands up, snatches his coat, and practically bolts out of the room.
"I can't write anymore. I can't write anymore. I justβI can't."
I chase after him but it's too late. He's already out of the building.
* * *
The unraveling doesn't happen all at once. It is a slow rot, a decomposition of confidence that the Germans call Zersetzung. Psychological decomposition. It was the method the Stasi used to break dissidents not with torture, but with gaslighting, with subtle alterations of reality until the subject lost faith in their own mind.
The Tech Bros haven't invented the term, but they have automated the process. They have built a machine that weaponizes mediocrity and sells it as perfection.
Two weeks later, I sit in Leo's apartment. The air is heavy with the smell of stale laundry and despair. I have brought cookiesβoatmeal raisin, heavy on the cinnamon, baked until the edges are crisp and the centers are dense and chewy. Food is a language of gravity; it pulls you back to earth.
"Eat," I say, pushing the container across the table.
Leo doesn't move. "I got into _Fiction Magazine_ ," he says softly.
"Leo! That's huge!" I reach out, finding his forearm. His muscle is tense, rigid as wood. "Why do you sound like you're at a funeral?"
"Because I didn't write it, Rob."
"You used the LLM again?"
"I used it for the whole thing," he whispers. "I fed it my draft. My messy, ugly, jagged draft. And it spit out... it spit out this smooth, perfect thing. And the editors loved it. They said it was 'refreshing.' They said the prose was 'elegant.'"
He pulls his arm away from me. I hear the frantic clicking of keys.
"Listen to this email," he says. His voice sounds like he's chewing glass as he reads it to me.
_> "Dear Leo, we were impressed by the fluidity of your metaphors. Usually, your work feels a bit... disjointed. But this piece sang. The line about the 'tapestry of fate' was particularly moving."_
"Tapestry of fate," Leo spits. The words sound like poison in his mouth. "I hate that phrase. I would never write that phrase. It's a clichΓ©. It's slop. But they _liked_ it better, Rob. They liked the machine better than me."
"They liked the conditioning," I say, my voice sharp. "They liked the familiarity. It's the linguistic equivalent of McDonald's fries. It's chemically engineered to be palatable, but there's no nutrition in it. It passes through the brain without leaving a mark."
"Maybe I'm just bad," Leo says. The sentence hangs in the air, heavy and wet.
"You are not bad. You are a jazz musician in a world trying to sell ringtones."
"But Robert, I can't do it anymore," Leo says, and then he breaks. It isn't a loud sob. It is a continuous intake of breath, a collapse of the chest. "Fuck, I tried to write this morning. Just me. Just a blank document. And I stared at the blinking cursor, and every sentence I thought of felt... weak. It felt amateur. I wrote, 'The rain hit the roof like gravel.' And then I thought, no, the AI would say something better. And I deleted it. I deleted it all."
I'm about to say something when he continues,
"I feel so stupid, Rob," he chokes out, the words drowning in his tears. "I feel so stupid. I let it into my head and now I can't get it out. I look at my own thoughts and they look wrong. They look like errors."
I stand up and walk around the table, navigating by the sound of his breathing. I find his shoulder and pull him into an embrace. He clings to me for dear life, his hands clutching my body as if I'm his only life raft at sea.
"That is the trap, Leo. That is the psychological warfare. They are selling you a solution to a problem they created. They want you to feel insecure. If you feel insecure, you pay the subscription. They are strip-mining your confidence to sell you back a synthetic version of it."
"I'm losing money!" he wails. "I'm losing money, I can't write anymoreβand readersβreaders love my LLM writing! I don't know what to do, Rob! Readers like it. Editors like it. Editors. Editors of Magazines. I can't write anymore! I justβwhat the hell is happening to meβwhy do readers like it?"
"I don't know," I answer honestly, rocking him, trying to comfort his soul with my words. "But just because people want to eat McDonalds, that doesn't mean we need to stop home cooking. But I don't know what to do. I'm just one person, but Leo, I love you, okay? I'll always be here if you need me. If you need me to look over a draft orβ"
"It's not just the subscription," he weeps. "It's the readers. They're getting used to the slop, Rob. They're getting used to the smooth edges. My writing... my real writing... it feels like it has too much friction now. Even the editors. Even the people who are supposed to know better."
"Friction is where the heat comes from," I say fiercely. "Friction is where the life is."
But he can't hear me. The Zersetzung is working. He is taking himself apart, piece by piece, and replacing the parts with synthetic fillers because the world has told him his own parts are defective.
* * *
Days later, it's my turn. we're back at that fucking writers' group. Although, today, it feels like it's a uniquely crafted torture chamber.
I decided to read something. I usually don't. I keep my work for my blog, for the people who understand that a screen reader isn't a constraint but an instrument. But I needed to show Leo that imperfection was power. I needed to prove that raw data hits harder than processed data.
I read a piece about my mother. It is raw. It is angry. It describes the sound of her voice as "a serrated knife cutting through warm butter." It describes the smell of the trailer park as "wet cardboard and ambition gone sour." It is jagged. It has no tapestries. It has no symphonies. It is a piece of writing that demands you look at the ugly thing and call it by its name. It's imperfect, but it's everything me.
When I finish, the room is silent.
"Interesting," Chad says. The word is a dismissal. "Very... visceral. But Rob, my guy, it's a little hard to follow. The sentence structure is all over the place. And 'wet cardboard'? It's a bit gross, isn't it?"
"It's the truth," I say.
"Truth doesn't scale," Chad says. He taps on his keyboard. "Just for fun, I ran your first paragraph through the new GPT-fiction-Plus wrapper I'm beta testing. Just to see what it could do with the core idea. I prompted it to 'elevate the tone' and 'smooth the syntax.'"
"Don't," I warn. My voice dropsβcalm, dangerous, flat. "Do not run my life through your blender."
"Too late," Chad says. "Listen to this improvement."
He clears his throat, loving this. I feel like I'm being punctured by a thousand arrows through the heart.
When he finishes, Chad beams. I can hear the smile in his voice. "See? Same info, but now it's palatable. Now it's _content_. It took out the aggression. It leveled the tone. It's objectively better writing."
A woman in the front row murmurs, "Oh, that is much nicer. It feels more... literary."
"Exactly!" Chad says. "I fixed it."
"Chad," I say, my voice calm, the voice of a teacher correcting a slow student. "Why did it choose 'stone' for the throat metaphor?"
"What? Because it's intelligent. It's smart. It knows. Because it fits."
"No," I say. "It chose 'stone' because statistically, in the petabytes of training data scraped without consent from the internet, the word 'stone' appears in proximity to 'lump in throat' with a probability of 0.04 percent, which is higher than 'wet creature.' It isn't a choice. It's a math problem. It is a predictive text algorithm on steroids. It doesn't know what a throat is. It doesn't know what fear feels like. It is predicting the next token based on mediocrity."
"It's still better writing," Chad insists, but his voice vibrates with the anger that someone who he thinks is a technophobe knows this tech better than he knows the tech.
"It is a hallucination of competence," I say. "Chad, asking that machine to improve writing is like asking a blender to improve a salad. You don't get a better salad. You get sludge. And you," I turn my head to sweep the room, "you are all cheering for the sludge because it's easy to swallow. You are letting this tech bro convince you that your own distinct flavors are defects."
I hear a sound next to me.
It is Leo. He is making a sound like a wounded animal trying to stay quiet. A high, thin whine in the back of his throat.
"You⦠fixed it," Leo whispers.
"See?" Chad says to me. "Even Leo gets it."
"No," I say. I stand up, unfolding my cane with a snap that sounds like a gunshot in the quiet room. "You didn't fix it. You lobotomized it. You took a scream and turned it into elevator music. You took the specific, painful texture of my life and turned it into a generic stock photo."
"Whoa, calm down, Luddite," Chad laughs. "You're just jealous the machine has better flow than you."
"I am not a fucking technophobe!" I shout, and the room flinches. "I built my own website stack from scratch! I code in raw HTML! I know more about the architecture of the internet than you and your wrapper-scripting ass ever will! I love technology! I love tools that expand human capacity! This?" I point my cane at his laptop. "This isn't a tool. This is a replacement. This is a parasite. It doesn't expand us; it eats us. It eats our confidence. It eats our specificity. It eats our struggle."
I turn to Leo. "I'm a better writer than thisβany LLM. So are you, Leo! You're a better writer."
Leo doesn't move. He stands up, sad, resigned. He grabs his coat and walks out. I quickly tap my way out to follow him.
"Rob," he says, stopping to turn back, facing my fury. "Rob, I wish I was as good of a writer as you. I'm a shitβ"
"Leo, no. You're a good writerβ"
"I can't write, Rob!" Leo screams. It is a terrifying sound, a man ripping his own throat open. "I feel so stupid! I look at my words and they look like trash! I can't do it! I'm done! I hate everything I do without the AI!"
I have Mo idea what to say. Leo comes closer, his hands grasping mine. The force of his grip breaks my heart.
"Rob," he says, and his voice shakes with tears. "I hate this. I hate this."
"I know, buddy. I know! I'm here. I'm right here, with you. I'm here."
As I let go for now, I don't know what to do to help him since my writing exercises didn't work. I told him to write fun Fanfiction. I told him to just write something bad. It's okay. I told him he didn't have to be marketable, but nothing is working, and he hates his own writing more as the days pass.
I know Leo can still write without an LLM. He just needs encouragement. This is the thought that plants another seed as I leave the building. I can't go home yet.
* * *
## Part 3.
I take a bus to the other side of the city, to a neighborhood that smells of pupusas, exhaust fumes, and resilience. I walk three blocks, absently counting the cracks in the sidewalk through the tip of my cane, until the acoustic landscape changes. The echo of the street vanishes, absorbed by walls of paper.
I eventually make it to The Cat's Shelf. The bell above the door doesn't ding; it clatters, a sound of heavy brass against wood. The air inside is cool and smells of vanilla (from the degrading lignin in old paper), binding glue, and peppermint tea.
Entering it is a sensory baptism. The floorboards groan under my feetβa specific, B-flat groan that tells me exactly where I am in the room. There is no ultrasonic hum of cooling fans here. There is the rustle of pages and the hushed murmuring of conspiracy.
"Rob?" Sarah's voice comes from behind the counter. Sarah sounds like she looksβsturdy, worn, and warm. She is a trans woman who built this bookstore with her bare hands and a lot of crowdfunding. She understands the politics of space.
"I need a favor," I say. "A big one."
"For you? Always. Do you need an audiobook or a body buried?"
"I need a router," I say. "And I need a space."
I explain it all. The Tech Bros. Chad. The Zersetzung. Leo's disintegration. The horror of watching a friend scrub the humanity out of his work because a machine told him he was inefficient. I tell her about the magazine editors who preferred the lie.
Sarah listens. She pours me tea. It's an act of love I didn't know I needed.
"you're not being hysterical, Robbie. They're colonizing the imagination," Sarah says softly. "That's what it is. Gentrification of the mind. They price you out of your own creativity."
"Yeah. That's why I want to make a space, a space where that can't happen. I want to start a new group," I say. "Here. After hours. But I have rules. No LLMs. Not just discouragedβblocked. I want to configure your router to sinkhole every request to OpenAI, Claude, Anthropic, all of them. If they try to connect, I want the browser to redirect to an HTML page that has a very judgmental cat purring at you."
"I love it," Sarah says. "When do we start?"
"Tonight," I say. "I can't go home. I need to bring my friend back."
* * *
We call it "The Drafty writer's group." It's not the best name I've ever invented, but I don't care.
The first meeting is small. Just me, Sarah, and a non-binary poet named Ash who writes sestinas about urban decay. We sit in a circle on mismatched chairs. I bring cookiesβchocolate chip with sea salt, the contrast of sweet and sharp designed to wake up the palate.
I don't invite Leo yet. He isn't ready.
But word spreads. I don't use social media with an algorithm. I use the vast power of word of mouth. We print physical zinesβlittle folded pieces of paper that smell of tonerβand leave them in coffee shops, record stores, and community centers. Any place that will let us talk about the space.
_Tired of the Slop? Come write poorly with us._
_Recovering Prompters Welcome._
_We don't want your polished draft. We want your mess._
By the third week, we have seven people.
One of them is Adam. Adam is a Trans Black man with a voice that is soft, almost a whisper. He sits in the corner for the first hour, just listening to the sound of pens scratching on paper and keys clattering, phone keyboards clicking, the rhythmic clacking of my mechanical keyboard.
"I... I used to use it too," Adam says suddenly during the break.
The room goes still. Not the hostile silence of Chad's group. A holding silence. A waiting silence.
"I wrote a story about my transition," Adam says. "And I showed it to a friend, and he said it was 'too angry.' So I put it in ChatGPT. I told it to make it 'more universal.' And it did. It took out the anger. It took out the specific smell of fear. It took out the things that made me, me. It made it... nice. And I hated it. But I couldn't stop. Because every time I tried to write the anger back in, I felt like I was doing it wrong. I felt like the machine knew better how to be human than I did."
"You weren't doing it wrong," I say. "You were doing it human. The machine averages out humanity until it's just a beige paste."
"I want to write the anger back," Adam whispers. "But I'm scared. I'm scared it's going to be bad."
"Let it be bad," Sarah says from the counter. "Be bad. Be furious. Be unintelligible. Just don't be artificial."
"We call that being a Recovering Prompter," I say. "There's no shame in it here. We know the pressure. We know the addiction of the easy fix. But we're here to do the hard work."
Adam picks up his pen. I hear the scratch, hesitant at first, then harder, faster, digging into the paper until I think it might tear. Encouragement and love flood the space.
There's still one person missing, though.
I send Leo an email and a text message, and yes, an actual letter.
_Leo,_
_I made a writing garden. It's full of weeds. It's messy. Nothing is polished. It's not perfect._
_We have cookies._
_I miss your voice. Not the LLM one. The one that shakes the floor._
_Come home. You are always welcome. I miss you. Come to one group, just one. We need you._
_- Rob_
He shows up twenty minutes late. I hear the bell clatter. I hear his heavy, hesitant steps. He smells of old sweat and that specific, acrid scent of anxiety.
"I didn't bring anything," he says, standing in the doorway. "I haven't written a word in two months, Rob. I'm empty. The well is dry."
"You're not empty," I say. "You're just quiet. Come sit."
He sits next to Adam.
"This is Leo," I tell the group. "He's the best writer I know. He's just forgetting how the instrument works."
"I'm not the best," Leo mutters. "I'm a fraud. I sent a story to a magazine that a robot wrote, and they paid me for it. I cashed the check, Rob. I spent the money."
"And you're here now," Adam says. "That's the work."
That night, Leo doesn't write. But he eats a cookie. And he listens. He listens to Ash read a poem that doesn't rhyme and has a stanza that is just a scream. He listens to Adam read a paragraph that is so angry it feels like heat radiating from a furnace.
And for the first time in months, I hear Leo breathe. A real breath. Deep into the diaphragm.
* * *
The resistance grows.
It isn't a war fought with DDOS attacks or angry tweets or furious posts about how AI sucks. It is fought with vulnerability. It is fought by local businesses putting our flyer in their windows. It is fought by people telling their friends, "Hey, there's a place where you don't have to be perfect."
Weeks bleed into a month. We start talking of putting on a live literature event. None of us have money, but none of us care. We want to do this.
As we plan, people come to just listen. readers arrive to just enjoy writers being messy on the page. Other writers that are recovering prompt engineers come to our space. They all write poorly while they eat and drink, laughing at lines, embracing hugs, feeling far less alone than when they walked in the door.
As the night of our first live reading is under way, just before the event, three people walk in who smell of expensive leather jackets and throat lozenges.
"Is this the place?" a woman asks. Her voice is incredibleβrich, trained, with perfect diction but a warmth that feels like velvet. It's a voice that knows how to hold a listener.
"Who's asking?" Sarah says.
"My name is Britany," the woman says. "I'm an audiobook narrator. This is David and Sam. We... we heard about what you're doing from the guy who runs the falafel stand down the street. We would love to read for anyone with disabilities or social anxiety or who just don't want to read work themselves."
"that's incredible!" I say, unable to hide my joyous shock, "but we can't pay you. We have a lot of cookies and anger but that doesn't translate into cash, and we didn't get enough donations to pay you all."
Brittany laughs. It is a musical sound, telling me everything is fine with the world. "Honey, I don't want your money. Do you know what I've been reading for the last six months? AI-generated litRPG novels. Thousands of pages of slop. I am dying of thirst. I am drowning in slop. I sit in my booth, and I read sentences that mean nothing, written by nobody, for an algorithm."
"We never seen a space for recovering prompt writers. This is such a cool idea. We want to lend our skills. We want to help. We heard there was grit here," David says. His voice is a deep baritone. "We heard there were jagged edges. We want to read them. For free. Just let us chew on something real. Let us narrate something that's growing into itself."
"We have plenty of jagged edges," I say. "Welcome to the writer's garden."
* * *
The Live Lit event was meant to be a small showcase. It turns into a riot of joy. We didn't shy away from the fact that recovering LLM prompters were going to be performing tonight.
**Live readings by recovering humans. Show starts at eight PM.**
The flyers catch the most attention. Sarah can't even fit everybody in the bookstore.
The alleyway is packed. I can feel the body heat, a wall of humidity and anticipation. It smells of rain, cheap beer, and electricity. There are people here from the neighborhood, people from the university, people who just sound tired of being sold things.
I walk up to the microphone. I tap my cane against the stand to gauge the distance. The hum of the PA system is dirty, crackling with interference. I love it. It sounds like potential.
The microphone hums and pops before me. None of us are audio technicians, and it shows. It's the most goddamn beautiful thing in the world. It's the sound of electricity trying to speak.
"Thank, uh, thank you all for coming," I say, and the microphone squeaks with a high-pitched feedback whine that makes a few people wince. I smile. I love that wine. It means the gain is too high. It means we are pushing the limits.
"You might notice our manifesto on the door," I say, my voice booming through the cheap PA system. "These writers... some of them have used LLMs before. Or what the venture capitalists call 'AI.' I think we can all agree, fuck AI, right?"
A cheer goes up. It's ragged and loud.
"But," I continue, lowering my voice, leaning in until my lips almost brush the metal grille, "I believe there should be a space for people that have been broken by the system. There will always be people that love whatever slop the LLM makes. There will always be those readersβand God help them, the editorsβthat prefer the LLM versions, the slop, the generated works that slide down your throat without you ever having to care about the artist behind it."
I pause. I listen to the silence. It is a deep, attentive silence. The kind of silence you find in a forest, not a packed room.
"Tonight, you'll hear grit," I say. "You'll hear mess. You'll hear first drafts. You'll hear bleeding onto the page. Nothing will be polished. Nothing will be sanitized. I admit, some things won't make a lick of fucking sense. But you all are here because you love the mess. You love artists. You love art. You love the chaos of a human mind trying to explain itself to another human mind."
I can feel the energy in the room shifting. It is a wave of warmth washing over me.
"We didn't tell you which writers are recovering LLM users," I say, my voice thickening with emotion. "Because they deserve better than to be hated. Psychological harm and warfare isn't easy to recover from. When a machine tells you your soul is inefficient, it takes a long time to stop believing it. But none of the pieces were generated by an LLM tonight. Not one word."
I grip the mic stand harder.
"So enjoy the recovering writers. Have some cookiesβSarah made them, and I can confirm by tactile inspection they are excellent. Be a part of the readers and listeners that listen to and appreciate art instead of just consume it like content pigs at a trough."
Laughter ripples through the room.
"If you don't want to support any of these writers for fear all of them used an LLM at some point, I understand. Trauma leaves scars. But there's information on how to donate to these writers in the front, and on the bookstore's website. Thank you for giving everyone a chance. Thank you for saying fuck you to the way others want you to be. Thank you for taking a chance on artists."
I take a breath. I can smell the ozone of the amp and the sugar of the cookies.
"Now... let's have some fucking fun!"
I step back. The applause is deafening. It isn't polite golf claps. It is stomping feet. It is whistles. It is the sound of a community knitting itself back together.
With every artist, the applause increases in volume. The audience participation is utterly stellar. There's whoops. There's cheers. There's exclamations of shock and wracked sobs and guttural laughter that spills out into the open space.
Nobody leaves. Everyone stays. Finally, it's time.
"and our final artist for tonight," Sarah announces, "is Leo."
The stomping grows louder.
I hear Leo walk to the mic. His footsteps are heavy. Solid. The footsteps of a man who remembers he has weight.
He clears his throat. It is a wet, nervous sound.
"This is... this is a first draft," Leo says. His voice shakes, just a little. "It has typos. I didn't run it through a spellchecker. I definitely didn't run it through Claude. And... for a while, I thought I couldn't write without it. I thought my voice was broken. But my friends told me broken things still make sound."
Laughter. Warm, supportive laughter.
"It's called _The Taste of Love_."
He begins to read.
It's the best thing I've ever heard. It's about his momma cooking for him in her kitchen. There are stumbling blocks. Some metaphors swerve a little. Everything is Leo again. It's the best story I've heard from him in months, even with its imperfections.
Britany, the audiobook narrator, is standing next to me. I hear her inhale sharply, a sound of pure appreciation as the scene unfolds before our mind's eye. His words grow in confidence as he dives deeper into his work. Everyone is engrossed.
"He's good," she whispers.
"He's real," I whisper back.
Leo continues reading. He describes the sound of a screen door slamming in the wind. He describes the texture of his grandmother's handsβ"rough as unfinished pine." He doesn't try to hide his tears when he speaks of her clothes. He doesn't hold back. He doesn't try to change any part of his mess.
He builds a world out of friction.
When he finishes, there is a second of silenceβthat profound, heavy silence that happens when a truth has landed in the room.
Then, the world explodes.
The applause isn't just hands clapping. It's yells. It's people roaring. It's whistles. People stomp their feet. I swear, I think the sound rips a hole through time and space. The wooden floor vibrates so hard it travels up my cane and into my marrow.
The applause is a physical assault of love. I hear Leo sob, just once, a sharp intake of breath over the microphone, before he is drowned out by the noise.
I feel a hand on my shoulder. It is Sarah.
"We did it, Rob," she shouts over the roar. "We built thisβthis nightβwe did it!"
I lean back against the brick wall, feeling the rough texture snag against my jacket. I listen to the chaotic, unpolished, beautiful noise of human beings screaming for a story that has jagged edges.
The Tech Bros can keep their tokens. They can keep their scale. They can keep their LLM modules.
We have the love. We have the care. And we have the voices.
And that, I realize as the tears unapologetically spill onto my cheeks, is something they can never code.
* * *
If you enjoyed this story, support artists and art. But for real, if you enjoyed this story, you might enjoy Frindle by Andrew Clements's https://sightlessscribbles.com/the-colonization-of-confidence/
