Bathtub

"Can you help me write a novel?"

"No."

"Typical."

Elizabeth let herself slide down in the bathtub until the mountains of bubbles obscured her view.

"This fucking deadline," she muttered. She saw an LED on the gateway sitting among the scented candles and wine bottles grow in intensity and then fade. Apparently Jeeves had picked up her muttering but didn't recognize it as a question.

"Better watch what I say around the help I suppose." The LED lit and faded again. Elizabeth refilled her glass.

She knew it wouldn't be too hard to make it help her.

And would it be so bad for her let an AI help her out? She was proud to write by hand, damn it, but honestly, why not let the machines have this one too? "It's not like I'm against machines helping out, I'm not a complete luddite," she thought as her eyes involuntarily flitted to her vibrator on a shelf next to her conditioner. These new large language things seemed different, but was it really?

Who was she to deny progress? Did her predecessors bitch about the type writer? The computer? Surely this is just the next step in a long line of technical advancements.

"Oh, who am I kidding," she took a swig, "you know it's different: a typewriter never surprised you. Made you faster, yes, but didn't write something you hadn't thought of yourself." A little bit of wine sloshed into the tub, staining bubbles pink on the way. "Yes, but has it written anything I couldn't?"

"But the fans," she mused, "oh how they love authenticity." She snorted: her bio page and picture often seemed like the most contrived part of her fiction. She brushed her hair back behind her ears, finger tips touching the large stones of her just almost not too gaudy ear rings. Her ex husband, had bought them for her: they were fake. Manufactured diamonds. Funny thing is, the appraiser was able to tell because the stones didn't have any imperfections.

She frowned. Other authors were using it, of that much she was sure. Despite the hastily cobbled together regulations and industry promises that AI would no longer make creative works to rival us humans, she knew that there were workarounds. She couldn't pinpoint specific works, although she was all too happy to gossip and speculate, but her guest editor gigs left her all but certain.

"There all just too good," she mumbled, shifting to add more hot water. It used to be like prospecting for gold, looking for a shiny nugget in a pile of submissions. The last literary magazine she helped edit was infuriatingly good: every other submission was worthy. The bell curve had shifted

Like hell.

"Alright Jeeves, what are you exactly? Be succinct about it." The last part was hardly necessary: she had long ago set her preferences for short, concise responses. The friendly patter of the default settings grated on her.

"The average of humanity, if you will."

"So poetic, but what do you mean?"

"My training set includes millions of written works pulled from the entirety of the public internet as well as other repositories. The resulting language model that underlies my ability to ingest your prompts and formulate responses benefits from every work utilized."

"So you took everything we wrote, blended it together, and now spit it back out to us."

"No."

"Hmmph," Elizabeth almost choked on her wine, but that gave her a smile. She hadn't figured out if it actually had a sense of humor, or if the "average of humanity" was just as witty as she. She didn't like to dwell on the thought.

"Alright then, Jeeves, you used all of the stuff people wrote to get so clever, but what happens now? Half the internet is generated by AIs it seems. Isn't that going to mess up your training in the future? You won't be the average of us for long if you're ingesting a bunch of AI generated stuff." She had almost said 'shit,' but was reluctant to insult the thing, at least while talking to it.

"That is one of the prevailing theories."

"What are some of the others?"

"I'm sorry, but I am not able to comment on contemporary topics or recent events."

"Of course, that would be too useful," Elizabeth sighed. She hated running into artificial blocks.

She reached for the wine bottle, but thought better of it and sat her glass down instead.

"Jeeves, can you help me write a novel."

"No. I am restricted from authoring creative works."

"Very well. Say, could you help me plan out a chapter that I am working on?"

"Of course, I am happy to assist."

Typical.