Slime

I remember once seeing a post about an illustrator whose work was famously ornate and intricate. The video said that their style was the only one that could successfully confuse early AI image generators—back then, AI would produce strange hands and awkward strands of hair whenever it tried to imitate it.

But now, even that kind of complex style has been fully absorbed, refined, and replicated. And AI itself has learned to avoid many of its old mistakes.

It feels like a level-1 slime suddenly appeared in a small town (AI art). This slime keeps leveling up, getting bigger and stronger, devouring everything it touches.

A level-10 hero (the illustrator) tried to attack the slime, but not only did the slime take no damage—it copied the hero’s experience and became level 11.

Then a level-100 hero challenged the slime. The slime was wounded a little, but it didn’t disappear. After a month, it copied the level-100 hero’s experience too, becoming a level-111 slime.

I have no way of fighting it. I’m just a small resident on the edge of town, someone who occasionally hears announcements from the loudspeakers. It takes me a whole year of effort just to gain 10 levels, while the slime grows at a million-fold speed. The slime has satisfied the vanity of many talentless thieves, and always been motivated to challenge, ans copy, another hero.

I know the mayor fully supports the slime. The mayor encourages it to grow even stronger so it can compete with slimes from other towns.

I also see many townspeople voluntarily diving into the slime, soaking inside it, saying how comfortable it feels.

I don’t know how to face this slime. The stories of those fallen heroes are so heartbreaking. Sometimes I wonder—if this restless, panic-inducing slime never appeared in the first place, would our town have been more peaceful and content?

Or maybe… we should just let it continue. And when the day comes that the slime wraps around the entire town, we’ll just boing-boing our way into cyber-ascension