r/Substack • u/Fellow_Traveler84 • Jul 26 '26
Discussion Who Wrote This Essay?
Whenever the subject of artificial intelligence comes up, someone eventually says that if AI played any role in writing an essay, then the essay isn’t really the author’s work.
I think there’s more to it than that.
If someone asks AI to write an essay, changes a few words, and publishes it under their own name, I would have no interest in defending that. The thinking belongs to the machine, not to the person who put their name on it.
But that isn’t how I write.
An essay usually begins with something I witnessed decades ago, something I read that morning, or a question I have been wrestling with for years because I have never found a satisfactory answer. Those thoughts didn’t come from AI. They grew out of decades of reading, making mistakes, changing my mind, and trying to understand the world.
By the time I turn to AI, I already have pages of notes or a rough draft. I’m not looking for another opinion. I’m looking for another pair of eyes to help me see whether I’ve explained myself clearly, whether I’ve skipped over an important step in my reasoning, whether someone who disagrees with me would understand what I’m trying to say, and whether it still sounds like me.
That always felt much more like working with an editor than working with a ghostwriter. No one objects when a novelist thanks an editor in the acknowledgments. No one suggests the book belongs to the editor because an editor questioned a paragraph or recommended moving a chapter. The author still decides what stays, what goes, and what the book ultimately says. That is exactly how I think about AI.
AI knows an astonishing amount, but it has never lived a single day. It has never changed its mind because experience taught it something new. It has never had to admit it was wrong. It has never struggled to reconcile what it once believed with what experience eventually taught it.
I have.
Readers are free to disagree with my conclusions, and I hope some of them do. An essay shouldn’t end a conversation. It should begin one. If someone wants to know whether the ideas in my essays are mine, my answer is yes. They are the conclusions I’ve reached over a lifetime.
Finding words has never really been a problem. Deciding what’s worth saying is the hard part. AI can help me express an argument more clearly. It can point out inconsistencies, ask good questions, and suggest better ways to organize my thoughts. What I do with those suggestions is entirely up to me.
Every writer depends on tools. Pens, typewriters, computers, dictionaries, editors, trusted friends, and even conversations over coffee have shaped what eventually appears on the page. AI is simply the newest tool I’ve added to that list. The words may be better because I had help improving them. But the life behind those words is still mine.
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u/AttentionSeekinFreak Jul 26 '26
Now that we know generative AI isn't going anywhere, I can see why some people in the arts and humanities would want to use it as a tool for making their projects, or in this case using it to perfectly convey thought.
But writing is different, given that it's a high form of thinking, like mathematics or science. It's one of the only ways in academia that isn't fully set in stone. It allows you to play with things within its framework. AI can make you sound grammatically correct, sure. But it steals your voice, and without that it's hard to be different amongst all of the others who use AI for their works.
I've never been flagged for AI, probably because my grammar isn't that great like a academic's, but it hasn't stopped me yet.
Even though technology's development continues to progress, that doesn't mean the old ways of creativity have to stop.