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I love writing. It's an outlet, and I can be as creative (or not) as I like. I'd like to believe that everyone who writes feels the same, and it's borne from a passion for the art.

But I know that's not the case.

It's becoming increasingly apparent that in a world full of grifters, all that matters is exactly how much you can SENSATIONALISE your material to gather CLICKS, as those clicks mean EYEBALLS - and if you can get enough views then you can MONETISE your writing, meaning that creativity leads to CASH.

The state of modern clickbait headlines are beginning to do my head in. No, not beginning to: they have been for some time. This isn't a new sensation, it's been happening for years.

We live in a world where I need to use a browser extension to remove all-caps words from the titles of YouTube videos, and replace the thumbnail images (almost always of a gurning face, and maybe someone pointing or covering their mouth) with a still from the actual video. This shouldn't be needed, but the drive towards clicks has made it so every creator now does the same thing in service to the algorithm.

So with the pursuit of clicks being the primary driving factor now - reads of an article, views of a video, listens to a song - we seem to have succumbed to the attention economy in all aspects of our lives. There is very little content that exists now for the content, and a lot of slop that exists purely to enrage, to provoke uproar, to drive attention in the pursuit of that sweet, sweet advertising revenue that comes from all those clicks.

Is it melodramatic to say that "art is dying"? With the recent rise of AI, it might be closer to death than ever. Writing, drawing, photography, music and more are all avenues that are no longer the confines of human emotional outpouring but very easily machine generated slop: seemingly "new", yet just based on everything that has gone before. I know that there's an army of people who will argue with me and say that AI has unlocked new avenues of creation for people, but that fact remains: anything coming from an LLM is a remix of existing media in some form. They learned how to produce things from ingesting everything that has come before. Whilst you may have not read that exact combination of words before, that exact combination of words was put together by a machine after analysing existing content.

But these words, these words you are reading right now? These are straight from my head. The "traditional" way of writing: I have thoughts, I make notes, and a new post is created. It has usually taken me weeks, on-and-off, to create. I feel that there's something being lost in a world where someone could do similar in seconds - particularly if all it's being done for is to create some clickbait. It's not passion. It's not art. And long term, it isn't sustainable.

I'll continue to write for the joy of it, because I love words. That's something I don't think a machine will ever do.