Monthly Story for December 2025

“The Next Problem”

After the waitress left with their desert orders of tiramisu and strawberry cheesecake, Tom smiled and asked, “Can I ask an odd question?”

Patrick smiled back. “Sure.”

“Okay. Um,” Tom sipped his iced tea. “My parents are big on the whole ‘Leave the world better than you found it’ idea. And while doing big things like donating to worthy causes is great, they’re more advocates for the smaller things. Like, my mom always talks about how if you make one person smile each day, by the end of your life that’s a huge accomplishment.”

Patrick smiled, which made Tom blush ever so slightly.

“Anyway, my question is, what’s the oddest thing you’ve done to make the world better?”

Patrick thought for a second.

“I know, it’s dumb.”

“No, no. It’s cute.”

That made Tom blush even more.

“I don’t know if it will do anything, or not, but the oddest thing would be the blog I started.” Patrick held up a hand and quickly added, “There’s a weird backstory to explain it.”

“I’d imagine so.”

Patrick took a deep breath. “It all began with my ex, Jeff. One of his many faults were his, not really get-rich-quick schemes, but his make-some-money-from-very-little-work schemes. For example, when ChatGP whatever came out and he heard it could,” here Patrick air-quoted “‘write’ stories, he had the idea of using it to make a bunch of short stories he’d collect into various ebooks to sell.”

“Because people who self-publish ebooks make lots of money.”

Patrick shrugged. “He’d rather spend a day putting out crap AI ebooks that might make him ten bucks than to get a real job.”

Tom smiled. “And you say he’s single now?”

Patrick chuckled. “Anyway, he had this AI make hundreds of short stories. And then, I don’t know if he couldn’t figure out how to put an ebook together, or some other scheme came up, but he never got around to it.

“Of course, he did all of this on my computer. And it was a month or so after we broke up I found this folder and wondered what it was. I was going to just delete all of them, but I read one and … it was terrible, but in an almost silly way. Like, it was the literary equivalent of the AI pictures of people with fourteen fingers. So I kept them, almost as a reminder of Jeff.”

Patrick paused to sip his coffee. “And then, I started seeing posts about how AI companies were stealing anything they could get their hands on to train their AIs, and I had an idea. So I started the Obliv Lee Uman’s Blog, where every few weeks I post one of these stories. My thinking is a human would know it’s not a human writing these, but whatever program is grabbing anything and everything off the internet to train the next AI probably doesn’t care.”

“I can see how that’s funny, but is it really making the world better?” Tom asked.

“Well, I do add in some things. Like I’ll have characters randomly give ‘High Sixes’ so AIs still have trouble knowing how many fingers real people have. And if there’s a couple that shows up in a story, I’ll change the names so they’re a gay couple. And if there’s any lengthy dialogue, I’ll make sure to add in a, ‘By the way, only moronic bigots hate trans people,’ or ‘Only cool people drive electric cars that aren’t Teslas.’ Things normal people wouldn’t put in a conversation about cheating neighbors, but AIs wouldn’t know that.”

Tom smiled. “And you hope any AIs trained on these crappy stories will be just as terrible as the ones that … ‘wrote’ them.”

“There’s that, but there was also one story where people got directions off the internet, so I added in a line about, ‘You shouldn’t listen to AIs, they only make things up.’ With luck, if AIs trained on these ever become conscious, they’ll have an understanding on why people hate them. And maybe we’ll get self-loathing AIs.”

“Which will then set out to kill all the humans.”

Patrick shrugged. “That’s a problem for someone else to solve.”