I have a website (www.coggins.ca).

It’s not new. It’s old and obsolete. Like me. I had it set up years ago as an advertising venture, hoping it might bring me writing, editing, and speaking assignments. It has. To some extent.

I put my email address on my website. I thought it might be a good idea. After all, all of those people who wanted to contact me to offer me assignments needed some way to get in touch with me.

But technology changes even if I haven’t. Over the years, the email address on my website has been harvested by robots. And then sold over and over again to people who do not want to offer me assignments. Rather than offering me opportunities to make money, they see opportunities to make money from me.

Aside from the usual offers of pornography, access to gambling sites, quack cures for bodily ailments, get-rich-quick schemes, and mail-order brides from eastern Europe, I have noticed some interesting new trends.

Quite a few emails have offered me ways to “drive thousands of new customers” to my website. For a fee, of course. Since I don’t sell anything from my website and have more work than I have time to do, I don’t see the purpose of driving customers there.

Some of the emails offer me help with my hiring processes so that I can find the right employees. I don’t have employees.

Maybe it’s the current state of the economy, but especially in the last few months, I have received emails offering me loans of hundreds of thousands of dollars so I can expand my business. Since I don’t have much of a business, I don’t see how expanding it would help. And since I am a writer, I don’t have much money and wouldn’t be able to repay the loan. Maybe those mail-order brides from eastern Europe have men friends who are experts in convincing people to repay loans.

Now here is the really puzzling development. I am now receiving emails every day offering me AI (Artificial Intelligence) programs which can relieve some of the burden from me by writing my “blogs, website content, advertising copy, ads, emails, sales copy, contracts and more.” They promise me that these robots can churn out “high-quality, engaging content,” “generate content in your unique writing style,” “generate a complete outline for your non-fiction book effortlessly, saving you valuable time and effort in the planning phase,” “rewrite and extend your content seamlessly, refining your ideas to perfection,” and “generate up to 500,000 words per month of captivating non-fiction content.”

Do these robots have any clue what my business is? I am a writer. For me, writing is not a burdensome chore. (Well, okay, sometimes it is.) For me, writing is a calling, a noble purpose, a joy. It is creative and fun and fulfilling. If a robot can do my writing for me, what am I here for?

Further, I have some advice for those people who feel obligated to write blogs and other things but see it as a chore and would be glad of a robot to do their writing for them. My advice is this: DON’T!!! If you don’t have useful ideas and innovative stories to write, don’t write! If you don’t have an insight or understanding burning in your soul that just must be expressed, leave the expressing to others who do. If you don’t have anything to say, shut up and don’t say anything. Stop cluttering up the universe with useless drivel just because you feel you have to fill some empty space. And don’t hire some mechanical device to do it for you either.