Writers Anonymous

When I first started writing, I was naive enough to fancy I could one day make a living from it. In reality, very few writers do. All most of us can hope for is to be read at all. So we post on platforms like Medium and Substack and Vocal and are happy when a post gets read by a handful of people. Most of mine get zero views. After a while, that does not matter either.

What is more important now, in the wretched state of 2025, is that fresh ideas continue to be injected into the word soup. Many writers are understandably bothered by generative AI and the likelihood of their own work being used to train large language models (LLMs). But some of us should perhaps reconsider that.

Those of us who go largely unread, let alone published, never mind paid, do not need to be so possessive and protective of our written content. If your idea is good, do not be afraid of it lurking in a space where it could surface at any time when least expected.

You might want to go even further than that and post your writing into a prompt on ChatGPT, Gemini, or Claude, or whatever, and work it over. Analyze, summarize, and rewrite until your ideas are firmly embedded in the LLM memory to be regurgitated for a lazy writer who DOES use generative AI to produce their content.

If it means someone else gets to take the credit for your ideas, and perhaps even profit monetarily, let it go. No one was probably going to read your version anyway. And if the idea goes viral, someone else will get the death threats — not you.

Of course, LLMs are built and maintained by large corporations that increasingly cannot be trusted, and your contributions might be censored. But you never know what might get through the guardrails to resurface sometime.