My Writing Is Human. I Also Use AI.

Both can be true at the same time.

Portrait of Louis Daguerre (1787-1851)

Let me tell you about a cheater.

In 1839, a Frenchman named Louis Daguerre showed the world how to catch a human face with light and a silvered plate. The painters were furious. This was not art, they said. The machine did the work. You just pointed it and pushed a button. Any fool could do that.

The poet Baudelaire called photography the mortal enemy of art. Serious people nodded along. A picture made by a machine could never hold a soul.

By the 1880s, the argument reached the United States Supreme Court. A photographer named Napoleon Sarony had made a portrait of Oscar Wilde, and a company copied it without asking. The court had to answer a strange little question: who made this picture, the man or the camera?

They chose the man.

This is but one example of technological change that wasn’t immediately understood by the people of the time. The art of photography would take time to be accepted. I suppose there are still some who question if photography is art. Others just enjoy the cat pictures. But back on track.

I use AI when I write, and a certain kind of reader has decided that makes me a cheater. The machine did the work, they say. You just pushed a button.

I did not push a button.

I run three businesses. There are only so many hours in a day, and I will not spend all of them wrestling a blank page when I have a tool that can hand me a rough draft to argue with. I’ve spent months arguing with my AI tools, teaching it to know me, to know my style. Teaching it my values. My passions. I throw out most of what it gives me. I rewrite the rest until it sounds like I want it to, because I am a control freak of the highest order.

An author once tried to convince me that words were precious. I explained that the magic is in the editing, and it is highly possible to rewrite every word a dozen times. No, the draft isn’t precious. The final piece, those final words, those are what matter to me. Those are my art.

Every word that ends up in the final piece is a word I chose.

That is what a photographer does. The camera catches the light. The photographer decides where to stand and what to throw away. The machine makes the image. The artist makes the photograph. Both of those things have been true at the same time for almost two hundred years, and the world did not end.

Here is the part people miss. They think it has to be one or the other. Human or machine. Or maybe some tidy split, sixty percent me and forty percent the software, like a recipe.

It doesn’t work like that.

A photograph is one hundred percent made by a machine and one hundred percent made by a human being, and there is no contradiction hiding in that sentence. Authorship was never about the tools. It was about who decided what the thing would mean.

My writing is the same. The words may pass through a machine. The choosing never does.

Now. If you are a writer who quietly uses these tools and keeps your mouth shut because the internet is a frightening place right now, I want to talk to you for a second.

You are not wrong. These are scary times, and you do not owe anyone a public confession. Use what helps you. Make your beautiful things. If you need to keep your head down, keep it down, and I will be over here distracting the pitchfork and tomato crowd. Be magnificent. Race ahead and joyfully dance with the words.

And if you are the other kind of reader, the one already sharpening a pitchfork or gathering tomatoes because I picked up a tool you do not like, I want to be kind about this.

This is not the newsletter for you.

That is not an insult. I don’t dislike you or want to argue with you. I respect your views and your right to have them. We are not going to agree, and I am not going to spend the hours I have trying to win you over. There are thousands of writers who feel exactly the way you do. Go and read them, with my blessing. The door is right there, and it’s not locked. Like the reader who left because I dared write about a non-binary alien character, I hold no ill-will when you leave.

Now, a quick word about the machinery, since we are here.

Substack has a scanner that reads our writing and guesses whether a machine helped make it. Mine is switched on. Go ahead and look. I have nothing to hide, and I am genuinely curious what the AI powered detector will make of me. (Yes, I scan myself before I publish. Curiosity. Cats. You know how it goes.)

I suspect Substack is trying to hold back a flood of low quality content, and I get it. There is a great wave of fast, hollow content out there, and I understand needing to survive that flood. A platform needs to keep its head above water. I just do not think asking an AI to scan for AI signs is the right solution. It cannot tell the difference between a writer who leaned on a machine and a writer who surrendered to one. It only reads the surface. It cannot read the heart.

Readers can, though. You can feel the difference between writing that was cared for and writing that was cranked out. Can’t you?

So read for the heart. That is the one thing no scanner will ever do for you.

Some may say that I do not announce all this loudly enough. That I should stamp a label on every post, every article, every book I write.

I wrote a whole book about how I work with AI. I teach a class on it. If you want to know how I make what I make, I have handed you the map with both hands. What I will not do is stamp a warning on every sentence I write, as if I owed you a fresh confession each time I sit down at the keyboard.

I’ve been a writer since I could hold a pencil. I remember my first typewriter. My first word processor. And now… I have fond memories of my first AI assistant.

If any of this makes you curious instead of angry, wonderful. That is my favorite kind of reader, and you are welcome here. I’m going to keep writing for you, and using the tools to create new content, new stories. Or finally just get around to polishing my old ones.

My book, Reflections from the Mirror, lives right here and it is free to read or you could buy your own copy. It is the long, patient version of everything I just said, including the parts where the tool and I got it gloriously wrong. And if you want the hands-on version, I teach a class called Creative Collaboration with AI, and I would love to have you join me in playing with all the new toys.

My writing is human. It comes from my heart, because that is the only place I have ever known how to write from. Sometimes a machine helps me get it onto the page.

Both of those things are true.

Read for the heart. You will find me there.