A Note on How I Write

I give up.

Not on writing. On trying to figure out which parts of my writing are “AI” and which parts are “me.”

At some point, the distinction became both impossible and, more importantly, uninteresting.

So here’s the deal.

Everything you read here is mine.

The stories are mine. The mistakes are mine. The pain is mine. The questions, obsessions, ambitions, failures, strange little realizations, book notes, half-formed ideas, and things I’m still trying to understand are mine.

But a machine has almost certainly touched the words.

Sometimes it helps me organize a mess of notes. Sometimes it argues with me. Sometimes it points out that something I think is profound is actually obvious. Sometimes it finds the thing buried three paragraphs down that I was actually trying to say. Sometimes it rewrites a sentence twenty different ways until I realize the first one was better.

And sometimes it produces language I would not have found on my own.

I’m fine with that.

I don't type a prompt, hit a button, and publish whatever comes out. What you're reading may have gone through two drafts or twenty-five. I question it, reject things, rewrite things, argue with it, move things around, put my language back in, take its language out, put some of its language back in, and eventually reach the point where I read the thing and think:

Yes. That’s what I mean.

That’s my standard now.

Not: Did a human type every word unaided?

But: Is this true to what I think? Is it honest about what I experienced? Is it worth putting into the world? And did the process make the idea clearer or more useful to another person?

There’s an old joke about originality being mostly a matter of hiding your sources well enough. I’m not particularly interested in hiding mine.

I read books. I steal structures. I remember conversations. I underline things. I forget where ideas came from. I absorb people I admire. I change my mind. I talk to machines. All of it goes into the same strange compost pile that human beings have always called thinking.

AI is in that pile now too.

Permanently, as far as I can tell.

And I’ve decided I’m not going to spend the rest of my writing life performing forensic analysis on every paragraph to determine whether a particular phrase emerged from my fingers, from something I once read, or from the fifteenth round of a conversation with a language model.

I would rather write.

A lot.

I would rather take the seed of an idea from my actual life and keep working on it until it becomes something worth giving you.

AI has made me more prolific, but more importantly, it has made the process more demanding. I have something available at almost any hour that can question an assumption, challenge an argument, find a contradiction, suggest another direction, or tell me that I haven't actually said what I think I've said.

Used badly, that can certainly produce mountains of polished nothing.

I'm trying to use it for the opposite.

To get closer to the thing.

To think harder.

To make the writing clearer.

To turn something I lived, learned, noticed, or struggled with into something another person might be able to use.

So yes: AI helped with this.

Probably with almost everything I publish from here forward.

If that bothers you, I understand. You get to decide what you want to read.

But I’m done apologizing for it, hiding it, or pretending I can cleanly separate the machine from the process anymore.

The machine helped make this.

I made the decisions.

And what you're reading is me.