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When Ilya Rozanov was twelve years old, his mom died. He hated his family and he hated Russia, so he decided he wanted to move to America. The best way he could think to do so was to become a professional hockey player, since he already played hockey, but that would take a LOT of work. He'd have to get super specific with his diet, since he was still a growing boy. He'd have to train with professional coaches for hours and hours every week, and he'd have to work on honing even the tiniest of skills.
Ilya didn't want to do any of that. He thought that maybe there was an easier way to get the outcomes he sought—a shortcut.
Even though it was like 2003 and Claude's parent company wouldn't be founded for eighteen more years, Ilya logged onto his family computer and opened up the Anthropic website. He made an account (at least that's how I assume it works, I've never done this myself) and opened up a new chat with the company's primary AI product, Claude. He'd heard that if he talked to Claude, Claude could give him anything he wanted.
Ilya: I want to get better at hockey.
Claude: I totally understand! Let's talk logistics. What skill were you looking to improve?
Ilya then told the language model that he wanted to be a good enough player to be in the NHL. Immediately, even though Ilya was twelve, the AI stretched his limbs to make him over six feet tall and swelled his muscles until he was one hundred pounds heavier. Ilya thought for sure that the process would've been painful, but it didn't hurt at all. In fact, it felt good. On top of that, Claude had automatically developed all his hockey skills. It had even improved his hockey IQ. He'd gotten the results without doing the hard part, and no one would ever know!
Everyone was shocked and appalled at Ilya's sudden growth and improvement, especially since he was a twelve-year-old little boy who now looked like a twenty-year-old man. People started asking for his birth certificate like a Dominican baseball player (looking at you, Albert Pujols) but every time, he was able to prove he was truly the age he said he was. Ilya got drafted first overall into the NHL, in a surprise to literally no one, and got to fulfill his dream of moving to America and playing for the Bruins—sorry, I mean Bears.
Ilya's new American doctor, Marcus Webb, was absolutely shocked when Ilya explained how he'd become such a hockey god. He thought the use of the technology was fascinating. Ilya didn't mind telling him about it since everything was bound by medical confidentiality.
In America, Ilya also met a very cute Canadian hockey player named Shane Hollander, and they started fucking nasty pretty much every time they were in the same city. Ilya's body, ruined by the AI, wasn't actually capable of feeling real sexual pleasure. He was pretty sure every time he fucked, Claude was the one that got to cum. However, he didn't mind because everyone thought he was magical in bed, and that was good enough for him. Besides, someone thinking he came was basically the same as coming himself.
Over the years, as AI got more popular, more and more players started getting accused of using it to hone their skills. The league had no official policy since there was no way to prove it, but fans swore they could tell, by the blandness of a player's style or by weird quirks that were almost only ever seen in the AI-assisted players. Some players came clean and tagged themselves as AI-generated. They'd wear big red tags that went through their ears, like cows. The tags only occasionally got ripped out during play.
Even Ilya got a few accusations from some of the most observant fans, but he insisted that he'd never touched Claude in his life. His good friends, like Shane, defended him. They even threatened to go on strike when the fans harassing Ilya got too intense. Other fans who believed Ilya scared the ones accusing him until they got quiet, and the whole situation eventually died down.
One night, when he and Shane were twenty-five or so, they were laying together in bed after sex. Ilya had decided that tonight he would ask Shane if he wanted to be his boyfriend, because they got along so well and the sex was so good. For Shane, anyway. Ilya's dick was still sensationless. He knew Shane was scared but thought that maybe he could talk him into it. He'd asked Claude for help in how to guide the conversation.
Shane sat up. "I'm gonna go shower."
"Don't be too long."
"I'll try. No promises."
Ilya loved when Shane got flirty. He watched him stand, all the lean lines of him in the low light, and watched Shane's eyes trail over his own form. His hair, his face, his abs, his hips, his cock, his thighs, his feet…
Oh no. His feet. Shane's eyes locked onto the bottom of Ilya's foot and got wide.
Right away, Ilya knew what Shane had spotted. See, ever since that fateful day in 2003, Ilya had "font-claude-response-body" written on the bottom of his foot in a clean, sans-serif font, like the name "Andy" on the bottom of Woody's boot in Toy Story except without the charm.
Shane looked up at him with shock and hurt written across his face. "What the fuck is that?"
"Shane—"
"You motherfucker! You lied to me!"
"I only wanted some help with my skating!"
"There are assistive AI programs for that! That's been around since the nineties, just like non-generative programs for translations and spellcheck! Or you could've asked a coach to help you! A friend. You could've asked me!
"They aren't as accurate, and I didn't want to waste someone else's time."
Shane shook his head indignantly. "Then you would do the best you can by yourself, and people would understand. You don't use AI without telling people! All those times people accused you. All those times I defended you! And you were using the slop machine the whole time."
"I know. I'm sorry. Let me explain. I was afraid. I was afraid that I would never be a good enough hockey player by myself. I thought I would not be able to do it without help." Ilya sniffed. "Can you ever possibly forgive me?"
"Hell no. Fuck AI. AI uses the skill and hard work of creative people to replace them. It steals their work without their knowledge or permission to make itself better. AI-generated work fundamentally violates what it means to be a writer, an artist, a researcher. It makes mistakes. It produces bland, formulaic writing that has no genuine meaning to anyone, least of all the person who prompted it. It dupes people into accidentally supporting something they're against. It requires the destruction of habitat to build its data centers, consumes megawatts of electricity, and wastes millions of gallons of drinkable water every month while large portions of the planet are in the midst of a drought. It disproportionately harms the poor and people of color. It's a fucking plague on this world, and I don't respect anyone who uses it."
"I'll tell everyone what I did! I'll come clean! I'll tag it!"
"Sure. That's better, that gives people a choice whether or not to support you, but I still think it's wrong. You hurt everyone when you use AI for fics athletics. You hurt our environment, and you hurt those of us who actually put our passion and labor into every facet of everything we do. It's like you came into my house, put on my skin, and pretended you were like me, but you were lying the whole time. And then you had the gall to get offended when people called you out on it! I'm sorry I ever cared about you, or trusted you."
"Shane." Ilya's eyes were wet. "I was going to ask you tonight if you want to be together for real."
"Oh, fuck that. Don't contact me ever again."
Shane got up, put his clothes on, and left the hotel room that instant. He then called Rose's hot friend, Miles, who immediately drove to his house in Montreal (which Ilya still hadn't been allowed to see) and fucked his brains out. Shane came hands-free twice. They got married and had three children, and Shane was very very happy and never thought about Ilya in a sexual or romantic way again.
Ilya, seeing his Shanebug with someone else, wanted to fucking kill himself. He was totally miserable. One day, in the middle of a game against Montreal, he cried out in pain. "If only I'd known! How empty it is. How pointless. I tried to be like them. I tried to blend in, and I tried to cover my tracks, but now they've found out and they hate me."
Shane, who had just skated by and scored because Ilya had completely given up defending in favor of being melodramatic, looked at Ilya with a confused expression. He had no idea what the fuck Rozanov was doing.
In pure agony, Ilya decided to end his pointless existence, right there in the arena. He took off his skate, lifted it to his neck, and slit his own throat with the blade.
Unfortunately, his AI-generated body didn't respond to the trauma the way a normal human body would, so all that happened was a little bit of Compu-Lube dripped out of his neck onto the ice. Ilya was then taken to a local hospital for a seventy-two hour psychiatric hold. He kept rambling to them about the mistake he'd made and how sorry he was, but the nurses told him it was okay, and that he'd probably only used the AI to fine-tune his shooting, and that everyone messes up every now and then, and he'd only used AI one time in a twenty-year hockey career, surely that meant it was okay. Meanwhile, the hockey fans revolted at the thought of ever seeing Ilya on the ice again, so NHL commissioner Sam Altman Gary Bettman Roger Crowell permanently banned him from professional play. It had nothing to do with the whole AI thing, it was just because people didn't like him. Also, Dr. Webb leaked his medical records :(
Ilya eventually got out of the hospital. Left with no Shane, no hockey, and a profound emptiness regarding his career, he got into his 2017 Vegas Yellow Audi Spyder and drove it to the bottom of the Charles river, where he stayed until his AI-assisted body finally shorted out. The car was found forty-seven years later during a dredging project, and promptly compacted into an eighteen-inch cube. Some of the workers at the recycling plant noticed the skeleton inside, but they thought it was artificial plastic garbage, not the real thing.
