I Have a Confession to Make About AI

Substack recently added a feature from a provider called “Pangram” that lets readers know if AI was used in creating an article.

Naturally, the Internet reacted calmly and rationally.

Just kidding.

Within approximately six seconds, people had divided into several well-defined camps:

• AI should never be used for writing.

• AI should always be used for writing.

• “What’s Pangram?”

• People who somehow turned this into a discussion about capitalism.

Personally, I checked the announcement and thought, “Oh. That’s useful.”

Because here’s the thing. I use AI. There. I said it. Go ahead. Point dramatically. Clutch your pearls. Notify the village elders.

I use AI for much the same reason I use spell check, a thesaurus, and that friend who says, “You know, that sentence has fourteen commas.” I cannot afford a professional editor. I can afford twenty bucks a month for ChatGPT. This seems like a good trade.

Often I’ll write a paragraph and think, “This sentence is terrible.” Not grammatically terrible, structurally terrible. Like it wandered into traffic and got hit by two semicolons.

So I’ll ask AI to smooth it out. Sometimes I use its suggestion. Sometimes I hate its suggestion. Sometimes its suggestion gives me an idea that turns into something completely different.

It’s less “robot writes article” and more “robot sits in the corner saying, ‘Have you considered not writing that sentence like you’re being chased by bees?’”

That’s useful.

There have also been articles that were difficult for me to write.

You know the kind. The ones where your brain is running at about eighty miles an hour while your fingers are trying to steer through tears and frustration, and what comes out looks less like prose than a transcript of someone arguing with a smoke detector.

Those articles were mine.

Every opinion.
Every experience.
Every embarrassing admission.
The AI didn’t invent any of that. It just helped untangle the knots.

So I added a disclosure, because I figured honesty is easier than having someone “discover” that I occasionally asked a computer whether paragraph three should really contain six parenthetical statements.

AI is a tool. Some people use power drills. Some people use table saws. Some people use ChatGPT to point out that they have used the phrase “kind of” seventeen times in four paragraphs.

The tool isn’t the interesting part. The finished work is. Or in my case, the finished article.

Judge that. If you think it’s funny, thoughtful, insightful, or complete nonsense, that’s on me. If it’s badly written, I don’t get to say, “The AI made me do it.”

Likewise, if it’s well written, the AI doesn’t get the byline. I do.

Which brings me to one final disclosure.

This article was generated entirely by AI. Not because I couldn’t write it myself, but because sometimes being just an oppositional defiant, petty bitch is artistically satisfying.