Somewhere around the 600th post, the question stopped being curious and started becoming pointed.
Do you use AI for your writing?
Sometimes it was asked gently. Sometimes it came wrapped in a raised eyebrow. Occasionally, it felt like a test. As if admitting to it would somehow disqualify the work, or cheapen the thinking behind it.
My answer has always been the same.
Yes, I do.
And then I usually follow it with another question, asked quietly, without defensiveness.
Why wouldn’t I?
We use tools for almost everything that matters. We use them to travel faster, to see farther, to calculate better, to remember more. We use tools to sharpen our thinking, not replace it.
Writing is no different.
The problem is not using AI. The problem is outsourcing your thinking to it. The danger is not assistance. The danger is dependence. There is a meaningful difference between a tool that supports your voice and a crutch that replaces it. Confusing the two is where the conversation tends to fall apart.
After nearly two years of writing publicly, almost daily, I have learned one thing with certainty. No tool can save you if you do not have something real to say. And no tool can fake lived experience, pattern recognition, memory, or judgment. Those come from time, from failure, from repetition, from paying attention.
Most days, my writing does not begin with a keyboard. It begins with a thought that refuses to stay quiet.
Sometimes I am reading something and a line stops me. Not because it is new, but because it wakes up an idea that has been sitting with me for years. Dormant. Half-formed. Waiting. In those moments, the credit belongs to the reading, and I name it as such. Intellectual honesty matters to me.
Other times, a thought arrives uninvited. I am walking, driving, teaching, listening to someone talk, or replaying a conversation in my head. It is rarely novel. More often, it is a recollection of something I have already lived, taught, or shared in another form. Experience does that. It loops back on itself, offering new angles if you let it.
And then there is the third source. The quietest one. The deepest one.
For almost twenty years, I have kept a private record of thoughts, feelings, observations, conflicts, and predictions. Some of it is clumsy. Some of it is raw. Some of it is surprisingly sharp. From time to time, I go back, open an old page, and realize I was circling the same questions long before I had the language to express them properly. Those moments feel less like writing and more like a conversation with an earlier version of myself.
That is where the work begins.
When the thought is ready, I capture it as a voice memo. Sometimes it is clean and focused. Sometimes it is messy and wandering. I use different applications depending on where I am, what I am doing, and how quickly I need to get the idea out of my head before life interrupts it. The specifics do not matter. What matters is that the thinking is mine. Unfiltered. Unpolished. Human.
Only after that do I bring AI into the process.
Never before.
I ask it to help me see more clearly. To clean up the clutter. To make the language easier on the eyes without sanding down the edges that make it mine. I am explicit about that. I am not asking it to write for me. I am asking it to help me hear myself better.
Then I read it out loud.
Always.
If it sounds stiff, I fix it. If it feels performative, I cut it. If the opening line does not pull me in, I rewrite it. The first sentence still matters. Attention is not given anymore. It is earned, line by line.
Sometimes this whole process takes minutes. Sometimes it takes much longer. Inspiration is not a factory. It does not run on a schedule. I have learned to respect that.
What I find most interesting about the skepticism around AI is that it often misses the deeper issue entirely. The real divide is not between people who use tools and people who do not. It is between those who think for themselves and those who do not.
Tools simply amplify what is already there.
If you have depth, tools can help you express it more clearly. If you do not, tools will only make the emptiness louder.
Writing, at least the way I understand it, is not about output. It is about sense-making. It is about pattern recognition. It is about sitting with ideas long enough that they soften, deepen, and connect to something larger than the moment that triggered them. That work cannot be automated. It cannot be rushed. And it cannot be borrowed.
This approach has worked for me. It may not work for you. I am not prescribing a system. I am simply sharing a practice that has helped me stay honest, consistent, and grounded while writing hundreds of pieces in public, in real time, while still living a full life.
At the end of the day, the question is not whether you use AI.
The question is whether you are still doing the thinking.
If the answer to that is yes, then the tool is doing its job. If the answer is no, then the problem was never the tool to begin with.