When Machines Start to Dream...

When Machines Start to Dream...

A reflection for writers in the dawn of imitation.


There’s a sharp heartache that comes from watching life accelerate faster than your body can heal from trying to make it. The pace keeps climbing, and this aging vessel carrying my faded spirit can’t catch up.

I have spent decades learning the craft of writing, often failing so I could improve. Ten to twenty hours a day, always more than six, I have studied the marrow of sentences … just to pull meaning from the quiet and chaos around me. To build stories that I once believed may outlast me.

My fingers, forearms, and joints hurt from it every day of my life. There have been nights I pressed frozen vegetables to my wrists and typed with one side while the other goes numb, switched, and repeated the process to keep a flowing page from drying up.

This future of mine holds ligament surgery, but I cannot yield. The competition is too great and presses the fight onward as I sleep; and there will be no bell to save me; to save us.

My mind turns after midnight. Insomnia…

The desire to succeed forces me to drag another thought across the coals until it takes shape. Only then can I get a sparse three or four hours of sleep and wake and punish my tendons again.

Now, I am watching programs do the same labor in seconds.

AI is still a baby but already creates books, scripts, and long videos faster than any person can blink. Some of it is bad; some is surprisingly potent. Not great. Not extraordinary. But convincing enough to fill each feed, countless scrolls, and every corner of what was once called...

​​​Continue reading my full reflection here:

https://www.crbuchanan.com/when-machi...