Artificial Submission

Author’s Note: This story includes themes related to the use of AI, but no AI was used at any point in the creation of this story.

Maria just felt burnt out. She had been working 80 hour weeks for years to become a successful journalist, and she had achieved her goal in theory. She had thousands of followers on social media waiting for her hard-hitting investigative stories about the government and big business. But she was also working for a tenuous start-up website that repeatedly cut her fellow staff members and was paying a salary that, per hour, was barely minimum wage.

When her bosses really started pressing the staff to use AI “for increased efficiency,” she was extremely skeptical. AI might be able to ape human writing, but it could never do something new, it could only imitate. And by relying on AI, she thought, humans lost their ability to think for themselves. It was insidious.

At the meeting, she pushed back on her bosses when they told her, “We know AI is the wave of the future, because everyone is using it!” It was an obvious tautology, and she and her colleagues weren’t falling for it. But they persisted, and eventually purchased a subscription for all employees for unlimited use of Epic, thought to be the current leading Large Language Model.

Maria had mostly heard about Epic because of a recent decision by its parent company to “experiment with taking the guard rails off.” That is to say, they had removed any limits on what topics Epic could discuss. If you wanted it to make you Smurfs porn, it would make you Smurfs porn. Copyright lawsuits were ongoing, including with the owners of the rights to the Smurfs, but the company was fighting every suit, and it looked like the government was probably going to bail them out. In any event, Epic’s user base had increased tenfold since the change.

One day the burnout caught up with her and Maria found herself unable to write a story about understaffing at VA hospitals. She had done all the research, but now she found herself staring at a blank screen while her deadline quickly drew closer. She suddenly became aware that her heart was racing and she was sweating profusely. A panic attack was coming on.

So she turned to Epic, and had it write a draft of her article for her. She was surprised at how good the results were. She barely had to change anything to make the article publishable. She submitted it, and it got more views than any other article on the site that week.

She spent the next week overwhelmed with intense regret and anxiety. What if she got caught? Would her career be over? But in fact, no consequences were forthcoming. Her editor sent her an email telling her how much he liked her article, with a few suggestions for her next one. Then, in the next meeting, the higher ups singled out one of her fellow employees who had used Epic to rewrite his copy in order to appeal specifically to the site’s core audience, college-educated women from 27 to 36. Maybe using the AI was wrong, Maria thought, but it was what her bosses wanted her to do. So who could blame her?

Gradually, Maria started using Epic for more and more parts of her job. She didn’t have to read scientific articles she covered if it could summarize them for her. She didn’t have to search the internet for the documents she needed when Epic could find them for her. She didn’t have to compose emails to every source when she could make “agents” that would do it for her.

Maria, who had barely had any free time for years, suddenly found herself with multiple days of it every week. She got movie and TV recommendations from Epic and found herself catching up on several seasons of For All Manklnd that her friends (her co-workers, really) had been telling her to watch for years.

And yet somehow, with more free time, she also felt more restless than she ever had. Well, not restless. Horny. She had been pushing herself so hard for so long that she had ignored her body, and now that she had unwound even slightly, she realized suddenly that she hadn’t gotten off in literally years.

She looked herself over in the mirror. Her dark hair was a mess and she still had that bit of pudge around the middle. She had always had to work to get guys to notice her over the tall, skinny girls. She felt dumpy and unattractive. At least her C-cup tits still seemed nice, though she didn’t have any clothing that showed them off. Why would she? When was the last time she tried to impress a guy, college?

She tried jilling off, but she couldn’t get her brain there. She had so many stray thoughts about work, about the world, about her life, that she couldn’t get in the mood. So she ended up rubbing herself desperately, deeply frustrated, barely feeling a thing.

As she had in so many other areas of her life, she turned to the Ai for help. She typed into Epic, “You are my sex therapist. Write a detailed, step-by-step plan to help me achieve orgasm through masturbation, in order to provide me with increased peace of mind and decreased frustration. Include advice to help me focus past persistent, intrusive thoughts while self-pleasuring, as well as physical instructions as to how to achieve maximum pleasure. Keep in mind that I am very inexperienced in these areas.”

After only a few seconds, Epic provided a lengthy response. It told her what breathing techniques to use, mental exercises to clear her head, and exactly how to touch herself. This went better, and she felt pretty good when she rubbed herself, but she still felt very awkward and found herself thinking too much about exactly what she was supposed to do where with her fingers.

Epic then recommended a small, lemon-shaped vibrator within her budget. It also, after some prompting, recommended several free porn videos online that she could watch on her phone while she held the vibe against her clit. It asked her about her preferences, but she really had no idea. So it told her it made guesses based on her other preferences, whatever that meant.

So she laid on her bed and put the first video on her phone. Somewhat to her surprise, it was of a younger girl, she had to be early 20s, getting completely manhandled by a large, muscle-bound man, in what looked like a warehouse somewhere. The girl groaned as he worked his enormous cock into her, then yelped and screamed as he began to fuck her roughly, holding her in his arms and bouncing her on his dick like she was a ragdoll.

She lost herself in the scene, thinking about what it would be like to be the girl in the scene, for a man to pound into her like a jackhammer, while holding the vibe against her clit. She had finally gotten past the blocks in her head, and she felt something building deep inside her that she had not felt in a long time. Without thinking, she hit the button twice to increase the vibration levels.

Maria was not prepared for her orgasm. It slammed into her hard, fritzing out her nervous system. She burst out in sweat, shaking, as the waves pulsed out through her fingers and toes. It was kind of like a panic attack, but the opposite. She could feel every muscle in her body unclench. It was only as she came down that Maria realized she had been screaming herself hoarse.

She realized, then, that following Epic’s instructions to the letter really was what was best for her. It knew better than she knew herself, apparently. She was going to ask it how to get fucked, hard, and follow its instructions to the letter.