Everyone is using AI to write. Stop pretending you're not.

We are way past professors using AI to write their papers. Now professors feed a set of papers into AI and ask where the gap is in the logic so they can write a paper to fill it. When submitting, AI tells them who will likely be reviewing the paper for publication so they can strategically cite that person's work. Spoiler: it's working.

And really, why does this matter? Academic papers were never known for stellar writing anyway.

The disclosure game is BS

When I had paid links on my site, FTC law said I had to disclose them. I did not. My feeling was: if my writing is good, who cares if there's a paid link? If I put a link in a post in a way that sounds stupid, you won't keep reading my blog.

The same is true with AI. Who cares if someone let AI write their entire post? If you think it's interesting, great. If not, don't read it. You've been making this decision forever. Nothing changes.

I've had human editors mangle my voice much worse than AI does. My first major writing job was at a magazine where my editor constantly added ridiculous opening paragraphs. Here’s an example. But when you have an editor, you don’t get to tell her she’s bad at writing.

This is just the latest round of gatekeeping

"Don't use AI to write" sounds exactly like "don't use the Internet to find story ideas" (1995) or "don’t let Grammarly write for you" (2010). It's the people who benefit from gatekeeping who try to keep the gate shut.

Meanwhile, the OG gatekeeper — The New York Times — is using AI to edit and write headlines. Because publications like the Times have such a strong, established voice, editors can easily adjust the AI output to stay consistent.

AI cannot say anything new

AI doesn't make logical leaps unprovoked. It doesn't say controversial things because it has a strong feeling that it's right. When I had guest posts on my blog, I had a rule that the post had to say something I hadn't heard before. Almost no one did that. Because when you say something new, people jump all over you. That's what new is — it jostles what everyone thinks is true.

We've seen this before in music. Anyone can make passable music with our current technology. But the technology can’t automatically dream up something that hasn't been done before. People have to do that. (See: street-streaming musical improv)

ChatGPT told me lawyers and entrepreneurs use AI most

Lawyers use it because half their day used to be busy work — now it's ChatGPT filing briefs back and forth with itself. Entrepreneurs use AI for all their sales and marketing copy. This means most of what you read online is AI-generated. But we already knew that the Internet is going to hell. That’s why we use AI instead of Google.

If you're a writer and not using AI, you're nuts

I uploaded all 4,500 of my blog posts onto ChatGPT and told it to help me be the best writer I can be and still be me. Every time it makes an edit that I think is wrong, I add it to our rules document. Things like: don't use bold for emphasis, edit the sentence so readers can feel the emphasis.

I can start with a messy post, and AI will organize it. Posts I used to throw out because I didn't have a strong enough editor, I can now publish. AI tells me when I've lost my mind. Or I tell AI that I don't care that it thinks there's no evidence for what I'm saying — I want to say it anyway.

AI tells me that I need to be more strange. That I'm at my worst when I don't let enough of myself in. I think that’s true, but I wouldn’t trust AI to know what’s brave versus what’s stupid. So I send almost all my posts to Nami, a real person, who can judge if I’ve gone too far or not far enough.

But you don’t need to know that to know if you like what you’re reading. You got to the end of this post. That matters more to me than anything else.