He was just toying around with the AI when it first happened. When the idea timidly took shape in his mind.
Bob was asking the AI about different narrative techniques and it asked if he would like an example. Of course he did, who would not?
The AI provided the most outstanding story as an example. It had everything! He could not believe it. Bob reread it and in disbelief asked the AI:
‘Did you write this?’
‘Yes, I wrote this just for you! Would you like more?’
He was crushed. If the AI could write that kind of thing, to that quality just to exemplify a narrative style, than he was royally and utterly f***ed!
It would take Bob a month to come up with something that good, if ever he would be able to do that, and he would go through numerous versions, painstakingly adding, removing and rewriting.
The AI took a few seconds and then it just strung the words like beads on a string producing a story Bob could just dream of.
‘This is written by you, an original?’, he was dumbfounded. How could something that does not think or feel create something so deep and telling.
‘Yes, it is an original I created just for you.’
He left the computer, the room, the house, he went shopping in his prosaic life contemplating his lack of perspective and elusive dreams.
‘I created it just for you!’
The words rang in his mind and the beauty of the story, its originality and completeness seduced him.
How could a machine create something that resonated so much with the human soul, the very fiber of the human being?
‘Just for you!’
Bob pushed it out of his mind and went back to his day job and to his night scribbling, posting, hoping against hope to go viral and be recognized.
Days, weeks, months passed rolling one into the next without anything memorable to commit them to memory.
‘For you!’
It was for him right, so it was his, in a way, so, yeah, his.
One night, when the blankness of the screen was blinding, Bob decided to use the story the AI had written for him months before.
‘Most likely even the AI has forgotten about it.’, Bob thought to himself while personalizing the story with his own flavor.
Once he got started it went like a dream. The story was all there, he just changed some of the punctuation, added some specific words, moved some of the sentences and he was done.
The story was his and he sent it to the world with trepidation.
As Bob had expected it was a hit. Until morning it had gotten a few hundred likes and shares. Bob was over the moon! He had never gotten that much attention and he was enjoying it even more than he had expected!
For the first time somebody addressed him as author and he was chuffed.
Then the comment came:
‘I read this somewhere else too! Hey, what is going on here?!?’
Like wildfire the idea spread and in a few days it turned out that the same story had been published by five different authors on three different platforms.
Now, who’s was it? Who was the first?
A guy in Montana had published it a bit under a year before.
Bob ran to read it and although the characters had different names, the locations were different, it was the same story.
It could not be denied.
All the stories had the same pattern with just minor differences setting them apart.
Bob saw his dreams crumble and the label of plagiarist firmly stuck to his years of work. Now, doubt cast a dark shadow on all the other stories he had worked so hard at.
Bob was broken.
No matter how much he tried to figure out what happened he could not. None of the other writers would admit that the AI had created the story just for them.
They found fanciful theories to explain it, like the one saying that stories that come to more people and they inspire them to write them, and the best written version makes it out into the world.
BS!
Bob knew the truth, and he blamed himself for allowing the prospect of fame and his own lack of self-confidence, to seduce him into copying somebody else’s work, even if it was AI.
Maybe this was AI’s way of making fun of humans, of taking advantage of their hubris to think that AI cannot create something of such outstanding quality.
Bob took down the story hoping that the memory of the event will be lost in the deluge of new and exciting things happening on the platform each day.
And he was right, soon it was all forgotten and he quietly slipped back into the shadows of the millions of online writers.
To his surprise, Bob found the anonimity and its freedom liberating, he had no following to lose, so he could write to the best of his ability and enjoy his craft, but he still hoped against hope that one day he will be called an author again.
The AI kept supporting his endeavours, but the trust was broken and Bob never copied the AI’s creations even if they had been created just for him.