me, myself, and ai

a writer's dilemma

from Tillie Walden’s Cosmic Slumber tarot deck

I feel like I’ve done something wrong.

After publishing anything, I feel strange. Unmoored. Lost as a mule in the big city.

But since publishing date night in the time of parenting, I’ve felt something else too.

Guilt.

Guilt because, well, here it comes, the big confession:

I used AI while writing that essay.

Like, I used it a lot.

forgive me for i have ai’d

Why does it feel like I’ve done something illegal? Like I cheated. Like I am bad.

To be clear, I wrote the essay, not the AI.

I spent weeks working and reworking the details, the drafts, everything. I just used AI to help, your honor, I swear it wasn’t a big deal. When I got stuck, when I needed some options for phrasing, when I wanted copyediting from “an editor at the New Yorker but we’re crunched for time because the piece is going out in a few hours so no big changes please,” yea, I used AI.

I’m not a bad guy I swear. please. Please you need to believe me. Here, look, I’ll write you a whole new essay by hand, and it’ll be beautiful and funny and, just sit down there for a bit and read or something and I’ll write this it’ll take ten hours but it’ll be worth it I am begging you please.

what fears the most

The fear spikes most when the AI comes up with a great line or passage, like for example the first two lines of how I ended that last essay:

Daddy is tired.
Daddy is tired because Daddy is happy.
Daddy is happy because Mommy is smiling.
Mommy is smiling because the kids are asleep….
(continued)

Claude (an AI tool similar to ChatGPT but with a human name) came up with that, and I really liked it, so I used it. I had to bend and mold it still, and the idea for the passage itself - a callback to a format I’d been using throughout the piece from a children’s book - that was mine too, but the line, the line was AI.

Then came the final blow. Last night, a kind human posted a comment that read:

SHIT!!!!!

Danver Chandler

loved the reframe of a line that didn’t come directly from my brain. I have duped Danver. I have duped everyone.

Obviously I hired a private investigator to find out where Danver lives and flew to his home, knocked on his door, and apologized. He called the police, which made sense given that I’d just confessed to the crime of using AI in my writing, and now I’m at the police station waiting for someone to come pick me up (I asked them to put me in ‘solitary’ but they said a) that’s not a thing at the station and b) I have committed no crimes).

but the last two lines, those were mine!

The last two lines of that final poem, in bold below, those were mine. I kept trying to get the AI to come up with a banger end and it couldn’t and then it came to me.

We are Mommy and Daddy because one day we held hands,
standing up, heights be damned,
and said yes to a life we didn’t understand.
And now we’re here.
On the couch.
Hands still held.
Somehow, it’s enough.
Even without dessert.

But shit wait the part before that - the ‘one day we held hands’ bit, I don’t think I wrote that!! And when I shared the draft with Lauren, she said this whole last part made her cry.

She told me that in bed actually — I’d fallen asleep already and she came in and I woke up and, like a true insecure sicko, said, all groggy, “did you read the draft?”

“Yea, I liked it,” she said, which I heard as “fuckin sucked.”

“Really?”

“Yea, the end obviously was really moving.”

"AI wrote some of that,” I confessed.

“…okay?” she said, not giving a flying fart.

maybe no one cares?

Does it matter that I had AI’s help? Do I need to disclose that information in every essay? Should I go back to Danver’s house after I get ‘picked up’ from jail and apologize again since our first go around got a little weird?

The reason I’m sweating way more than normal while writing this, like real lakes of water are forming in each pit, is that taking credit for something that AI wrote feels like cheating. Like I have violated the unspoken agreement made between me and the reader: I tell you the truth in the hopes that you believe me.

But is it really the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but?

Not exactly.

Truth is a slippery lil sucker.

Say I’m playing I Spy with Wilder and he says “I spy with my little eye...poop poop,” and then three weeks later, he and I have an hour long heart to heart about death while he poops. In a story, I’d probably make those all happen on one night. Legally, it isn’t true, but cosmically, for the narrative world I am creating, it is.

And that’s what matters. That you as the reader believe me, a request I make of you every time I publish.

The trust that undergirds (ew) that request is a serious thing, and not something I take lightly.

Telling the truth, here, doesn’t mean ‘giving only the facts.’

For my work, It means communicating as honestly as you can about something. “Here’s my best stab at what feels true right now,” I say with every piece, “what do you think?”

ok so now what?

The question of ‘who is responsible?’ for this work keeps coming up in my mind. In an academic context, maybe that means ‘who did the work?’ but here, in the too hot and also too cold land of non-fiction, that question means something different:

Who made the decision to publish this? Who claims responsibility?

And that’s always going to be me.

Right? Right??

Look at me, negotiating. We’re all doing it, scrambling to hold onto something, anything as the floor disappears out from under us, moving goalposts on what is and isn’t okay, what AI will and won’t be able to do, what humans are still going to be ‘good at.’

Tis a fool’s errand!

But that’s just it, isn’t it?

We are fools.

WE ARE FOOLS!!!

The fool is the hero of the tarot deck for a reason - it is the clown, the goofball, the trickster, the one who realizes that this is all an absurd game, all of us players. What game, though, are we playing?

I write a lot about finite and infinite games - the former you play to win, the latter you play to keep the play going. Finite games are the stuff of society. The infinite game is culture.

We are, at our best, players of the infinite game.

So why all this tumult? This hullabaloo? This unending negotiation, signifying nothing?

Well, you know what they say: you can’t spell negotiate without ego.

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i have so much more to write about all this

And your financial support makes it possible. Also I’m about to announce a sweet workshop series for paid subscribers! So yea, remember you can’t spell ‘go paid’ without ‘ai’

if you pay I promise to stop doing shit like that

lets talk about this

I am VERY curious to hear how other people are dealing with all this.

1. Are you using AI in your writing?

2. How do you feel about it?

4. Are you mad at me for using AI in my writing?

5. Do you hate me now?

7. What in the almighty hell is happening?