Yes, I Used It. Now What.

I got asked again last week. The question. You know the one.

"Did you write that yourself, or...?"

The trailing "or" doing a lot of heavy lifting there. Like they're giving me a chance to confess. Like there's a correct answer and I just need to find it in their eyes.

I want to tell you the feeling it produces is anger. That would make for a better essay. But the truth is duller and more depressing than that. It's exhaustion. The bone-deep kind. The kind that comes from watching someone you respect ask a question so reductive, so fundamentally unserious, that you can't figure out where to even start correcting it.

So you just say "yeah, I wrote it" and move on and feel a little gross about the whole exchange.

I've been in IT for a long time. Three decades of tools that were going to ruin everything. I am tired in a way that coffee doesn't fix.

So let's do this. Let's actually talk about it.

(disclaimer: bit of a rant ahead)

The Spell Check Nobody Ever Asked About

Here's a question nobody has ever asked you: "Did you use spell check on that?"

Nobody asks. Nobody cares. Spell check has been silently rewriting your work since 1996 and you've never once felt your authorship threatened by it. Think about that for a second.

Now Grammarly. You use Grammarly? Good tool. Grammarly suggests restructuring your sentences. It flags passive voice. It recommends entirely different word choices. Sometimes you take the suggestion. Sometimes you don't. Sometimes you take half of it and rewrite the other half yourself and end up somewhere neither you nor the algorithm started.

So what did you write? Did you write the version before Grammarly touched it? Did Grammarly write the parts it suggested? Did you write the final version because you clicked "accept"? Does clicking "accept" count as writing? Does clicking "ignore" count more? Did you use Google Maps to get here? (sorry, i digress)

Nobody asks these questions. Nobody has ever asked these questions. Because when the tool is familiar, when you've had enough time to absorb it into your workflow, the question sounds as stupid out loud as it always was.

That's where we are right now. The tool is unfamiliar. So the question sounds reasonable.

Give it eighteen months.

Did I use electricity to send that email?

Yes, Becky. I fucking did.

What My Process Actually Looks Like

You want to know what my actual process looks like? Fine. I'll tell you. It's not pretty and it doesn't fit on a flowchart or in a bucket.

Sometimes I write a full first draft. Twelve hundred words, beginning to end, my fingers on the keyboard, my thoughts in real time. Then I throw it at a model and say "what am I missing?" or "where does this get soft?" or "argue against this." I take what's useful. I throw away what isn't. I rewrite.

Sometimes I start with an outline. The outline becomes a prompt. The prompt becomes a draft. The draft is wrong in fourteen ways, but three paragraphs in the middle are doing something I couldn't have gotten to on my own that fast. So I pull those three paragraphs out and rebuild everything around them. My framing. My argument. My voice. Three paragraphs I wouldn't have found alone, at least not today, set inside a piece that is "mine" (whatever that means) from the title to the period.

Sometimes I go across three or four different models. I play them against each other. One is better at structure. One is better at finding the weakness in an argument. One writes prose that I can actually stand to read. I use all of them like I use colleagues in a brainstorming session. Except these colleagues don't have feelings, don't need coffee, and don't derail the meeting to talk about their fantasy football team.

Sometimes I talk into a voice memo for ten minutes, dump the transcript into a model, say "find the essay hiding in this mess," and then spend two hours turning what comes back into something I'd actually put my name on. Those two hours are where the writing happens. The model found the shape. I built the house.

Every single time, the final product goes through me. Through my judgment. Through my taste. Through my sense of what's more true and what's performing "truth". I decide what stays. I decide what goes. I decide what needs to be sharper, or softer, or cut entirely because it's technically correct and completely soulless.

That's authorship. That's what authorship has always been. A thousand decisions about what belongs. The tool didn't make those decisions. I did.

Two Buckets

I know why the question gets asked. I'm not confused about that.

Some people need two buckets. Human or AI. Real or generated. Authentic or synthetic. You pick one. The thing goes in the bucket. Now we know what to think about it. Now we know how to feel.

That's a comforting way to process the world and I understand the appeal. I do. Nuance is expensive. Sitting with complexity takes effort. It's so much easier to draw a line and stand on one side of it and feel righteous.

But easy and accurate are still not on speaking terms.

The world doesn't sort into two buckets. My writing process doesn't sort into two buckets. And the person asking the question usually isn't looking for an honest answer anyway. They're looking for permission to dismiss the work, or permission to be impressed by it, or permission to stop thinking. The answer determines which permission they grant themselves.

That's a purity test. And I don't take purity tests.

The Things That Were Never "Real"

You know what else wasn't "real"?

Synthesizers weren't real music. I was there for that one. Actual musicians, people who could play, looked at a Moog and said that's not an instrument. You're not playing anything. You're pressing buttons. Tell that to Stevie Wonder. Tell that to Herbie Hancock. Tell that to every relevant film score recorded in the last forty years.

Digital cameras weren't real photography. The film guys were vicious about it. No grain. No darkroom. No soul. Never mind that the same eye was composing the shot. Never mind that Ansel Adams would have used a digital camera in a heartbeat because the man cared about the image, not the apparatus.

Calculators were going to destroy mathematical understanding. They said this in the seventies. They said kids would never learn to think quantitatively. What actually happened is that kids spent less time on basic arithmetic and more time on concepts. The ones who were going to think mathematically still thought mathematically. The calculator just cleared the busywork.

Desktop publishing was going to kill graphic design. Wikipedia was going to kill expertise. Google was going to kill memory. Electric guitars were going to kill music. Drum machines were going to kill rhythm. sonauto.ai is going to kill Spotify (that one might actually happen)

Funny how none of those things died.

Every single time a tool extended human capability, somebody showed up to announce that human capability was being replaced. And every single time, that person was wrong. Not eventually wrong. Wrong immediately. Wrong at the moment they said it. They just couldn't see it because the tool was new and new things are scary and scared people say stupid things with confidence.

We are in that exact moment right now.

The Honest Part

So here's the honest part.

I use these tools. I use them constantly. I use them more than most people I know and with zero guilt. I use them because they make my work better and faster and more considered. I use them the way I use every other tool I've adopted in fifty years: aggressively, skeptically, and with full awareness that the output is only as good as the judgment applied to it.

The work is mine. The thinking is mine. The decisions about what to say and how to say it and when to shut up are mine. The voice you're reading right now is mine. It has always been mine. Many tools helped me get here faster. So did twelve cups of coffee and a public education and the entire history of the English language and western culture and conditioning.

If you read something I wrote and can't tell whether a human wrote it, that tells you something. But the something it tells you is about your ability to read, not about my ability to write.

Ask better questions.