On the line between your work and the machine, and how to keep what you publish honestly yours.
Something I wrote recently touched a nerve, and not the part I expected.
I'd written about using AI to help me notice stories in my own work. What came back in the comments wasn't really about noticing. It was about honesty. One person put words to something I suspect many people feel and rarely say out loud. When AI helps you write something, a blog post, a newsletter, the copy on your own website, where exactly is the line between your ideas and the machine's? How much of this is you? And if you put your name on it, is that honest, or is it a little bit of a lie?
I've felt that discomfort myself. The ick, someone called it. It's worth taking seriously, because underneath it is a real question about authorship, and waving it away doesn't make it go away.
Here's where I think the discomfort comes from, and it's personal for me. I spent years in education, first as a teacher and later in district leadership. In that world, for a long time, using AI was cheating. Full stop. A student who used it to write an essay had done something wrong, and we built much of our early response to this technology on that instinct. That framing runs deep, and it's a hard stigma to break. Even now, there's a quiet sense that if a tool helped, we didn't really do it, and pretending otherwise is dishonest.
But I've come to think that instinct asks the wrong question. The question isn't whether AI touched the work. Increasingly, for most of us, it did, and pretending otherwise is its own kind of dishonesty. The question that actually matters is whether the work was created by AI or created with it. Those are not the same thing, and the difference is the whole ballgame.
Created by AI is the version people are right to be suspicious of. You type a prompt, you take what comes back, you paste it in with your name on top. You never made a decision. The thinking got outsourced, and calling it yours is a stretch.
Created with AI is a different act entirely, and it takes more work, not less. Let me tell you what it actually looks like for me, because the how is where the honesty lives.
The first thing I did was build what I call a "My Voice" page. It holds samples of my actual writing, phrases I use, things I'd never say, small rules like never use em dashes because they don't sound like me. On its own that sounds like a productivity trick. It wasn't.
Writing it forced me to answer a question I'd never actually sat with. What does my voice even sound like? I had to make my own instincts explicit enough to hand to something else, and you can't do that without learning things about yourself you didn't know you knew.
The tool was the occasion. The real work was self-knowledge.
The second thing is that I never trust the first draft. Not once. Whatever comes back is a starting point for an argument, not a finished product. I push back, I cut, I rewrite, I tell it no, not that, this. It's a back and forth, and it goes on until the thing on the page says what I actually think, in the way I'd actually say it. Especially when it's going out under my name. That review isn't a formality. It's the part where the work becomes mine.
I should be honest about something, since this whole piece is about honesty. This post was written exactly the way I'm describing. I worked through it with AI, the same back and forth, the same My Voice page keeping the first pass in my register, the same round after round of me saying not quite, try again. Every idea in it is mine. Every line got vetted until I'd stand behind it. That's not a confession. It's the point.
I'll admit I'm not all the way past the discomfort. I still catch myself prefacing things with "I worked with AI on this," almost like an apology, like I owe someone a justification. I'm not sure I do. My honest hope is that someday the reflex flips. That the notable thing, the thing actually worth mentioning, becomes the opposite. "I didn't use AI for this one."
Until then, I'll keep doing it the way I've described. Defining my voice, arguing with the draft, and putting my name only on the things I actually mean. That, to me, is the line. Not whether the tool helped. Whether the judgment was mine.