Last Story

For anyone interested, this is the last story I am posting on this platform. Yes, I have decided to officially remove my profile and all work I created.

I will miss reading and interacting with many of you and I wish you the best, but I do have my reasons for leaving.

Years ago, I decided to join this platform to enter the challenges and immediately discovered a wonderful community of talented and creative, one might say, like minded people. Did Vocal have its problems? Yes, even then there was talk about the amount of self promotion needed to succeed and complaints about fairness regarding the challenges, but I can say one thing about it.

It was real. There was the sense that people were reading each other's words and asking for feedback to improve and that the work submitted was REAL.

I have never been very active, I simply don't have the time to be and I'm not a strong enough writer to see most of my pieces come together completely. But this is not why I am leaving.

There is still a great core of creators on here and I love to read your work that I know you created, but I have come to realize that the platform is increasingly attracting those only seeking profit. You know what I'm talking about, the so called writers who plug in popular topics into AI and pump out up to twenty pieces a day of AI SLOP on topics they really couldn't care less about. There are real writers on here, competing for the same engagement and coming away with little more than coffee change, while others are all over social media claiming twenty thousand reads per "article".

Here I go on my little soap box. AI is killing our humanity. It is not creation, it is reading and scraping together puzzle pieces based on the work of others because it was trained on every available source. This is NOT learning. It is NOT independent creation. It works on code, not synapses, or dreams, or life actually experienced. It cannot imitate actual life and it should not be allowed to compete for reader engagement along side actual living people who put in the effort to research and craft and edit. Writing as anything worth while takes effort. Not inputting a sentence and a topic and hitting a button. THAT is mass production.

I have not written a piece for Vocal since coming across this months ago and I hem hawed for months about leaving. In the process, my Vocal plu auto renewed despite me being one hundred percent certain I had not set it to renew. That $100 bill came amid some major financial strain my household was already going through and was really the last nail in the coffin for me. I have only ever earned $25 or so on this platform in all the years I have been on it. And yes, I know that I have not been very active, but I can not justify investing my money for not even pennies on the dime. I have already disconnected my Stripe account so this one is a freebie, though in reality all of my writing was.

Thankfully, we as writers still retain full rights to our writing and I do NOT give any permissions for any of my stories that still exist on this site.

I wish you all the best of luck.

Thank you for sharing your stories. Thank you for reading mine. Thank you for the engagement and for making this at one time a wonderful place to create and share the actual love of writing and reading without the main goal of profit.