Yes, I Use AI to Write. So What?

I have been blogging since 2010. Sixteen years. I wrote hundreds of blog posts before I ever had access to generative AI. I developed opinions, changed theological positions, explored philosophy, wrestled with consciousness and spirituality, and found my own way of expressing myself long before ChatGPT showed up. So when an AI detector announces that something I wrote is “70% AI-generated,” forgive me if I am not terribly impressed.

What exactly has it detected? Did it detect that I suddenly became capable of writing coherent paragraphs? I was doing that before AI. Did it detect my vocabulary, my sentence structure, the way I develop an argument, or the subjects I return to repeatedly? Those existed before AI too. This is one reason I think the growing obsession with detecting AI writing is becoming ridiculous. We have somehow decided that if software believes AI participated in producing a piece of writing, we have discovered something important about its intellectual legitimacy. We haven't.

The question that matters is not whether AI helped write something. The question is whose ideas are being expressed. I use AI unapologetically. I use it for research. I use it to explore ideas, find thinkers I haven't encountered, compare philosophical and theological positions, challenge my conclusions, and organize thoughts that are sometimes bouncing around in my head faster than I can organize them myself. And yes, I use it to help turn those thoughts into readable prose. I consider that intelligent use of technology.

There is an enormous difference between using AI because you have nothing to say and using AI because you have so much to say that you have discovered an extraordinarily powerful tool for helping you say it. That distinction seems to get lost in the current hysteria over AI writing.

If someone knows nothing about consciousness, asks AI to write a thousand words about consciousness, doesn't understand the result, and publishes it under his name as though he were an authority, I understand the criticism. But suppose someone has spent years thinking about consciousness. Suppose he has read widely, developed positions, rejected other positions, changed his mind repeatedly, and built an interconnected worldview involving science, philosophy, theology, mysticism, psychology, and personal experience. Then suppose he gives AI that intellectual framework and says, “Help me develop this idea.” That is something entirely different. AI didn't create the worldview. AI entered into a worldview that was already there.

In my particular case, there is a sixteen-year paper trail. Hundreds of blog posts exist from the years before I ever used generative AI. If someone genuinely wants to know whether the ideas I publish today belong to me, they don't need an AI detector. They can read what I was writing ten or fifteen years ago. They can watch ideas emerge, develop, change, and sometimes disappear entirely. My intellectual fingerprints were already all over the place before AI arrived.

What AI has changed is my ability to work with those ideas. I can take a thought that occurs to me over morning coffee and immediately begin interrogating it. Has anyone else proposed something similar? What would the strongest objection be? Does this conflict with something else I believe? Is there scientific research relevant to it? What would a particular philosopher or theologian say about it? What happens if I connect this idea with another idea I've been developing? That isn't AI replacing my thinking. That is AI allowing me to think interactively, and I find that intellectually exhilarating.

The accusation that AI-assisted writing is somehow inherently dishonest also rests upon a strangely romantic idea of authorship. Apparently, the only authentic writer is a solitary individual sitting in front of a blank screen painstakingly typing every sentence without assistance. But writers have never really worked that way. Authors have editors. Scholars have research assistants. Public figures have speechwriters. Publishers restructure manuscripts. Journalists have copy editors. Writers use dictionaries, thesauruses, encyclopedias, search engines, grammar software, citation managers, spell checkers, and word processors. Nobody looks at a beautifully edited book and says that because an editor changed some sentences, the author didn't really write it. But introduce artificial intelligence and suddenly we are conducting an intellectual crime scene investigation.

Then come the AI detectors. A piece of software analyzes another piece of writing and produces an authoritative-looking percentage: 47 percent AI, 68 percent AI, 82 percent AI. And what precisely does that percentage establish? It doesn't tell you who conceived the argument. It doesn't tell you who selected the subject. It doesn't tell you whether the author understands what was written or agrees with every sentence. It doesn't tell you how many times the text was revised. It certainly doesn't tell you whether AI generated the original idea or merely helped articulate something the writer has been thinking about for twenty years. Most importantly, it cannot crawl inside the writer's head and determine intellectual ownership. Yet somehow we have begun treating these percentages almost like laboratory results.

Of course AI can be abused. Students can use it to avoid learning. People can publish material they don't understand. AI can make mistakes, fabricate information, invent citations, and occasionally produce confident nonsense. Anyone using it seriously has a responsibility to check important claims and take responsibility for the final product. But misuse of a tool is not an argument against the tool.

I don't surrender my judgment to AI. If it gives me something I don't believe, I reject it. If it misunderstands my theology, philosophy, or view of consciousness, I correct it. If it misrepresents my position, I change it. If it produces language that doesn't sound like something I would say, I tell it so. That process itself requires thought. Ultimately, I decide what gets published under my name, and I accept responsibility for it.

That is why I think we need to reconsider what authorship actually means in the age of artificial intelligence. Authorship isn't fundamentally about keystrokes. It is about intellectual ownership. If I can sit across the table from you and explain what I wrote, defend it, elaborate upon it, answer objections to it, tell you where the idea came from, and explain how it fits into the larger body of things I have been thinking and writing about for years, then telling me the idea isn't really mine because AI helped construct some of the sentences strikes me as absurd.

In my case there is an additional irony. AI can learn to write more like me precisely because I have spent years developing a recognizable body of thought and writing. I bring the ideas. I bring the questions. I bring the history. I bring the theological evolution, philosophical curiosity, contradictions, experiences, intuitions, and occasionally a crazy hypothesis that I want to chase down simply to see where it leads. AI brings access to information, organizational ability, comparison, pattern recognition, and linguistic fluency. I don't see that as replacement. I see it as collaboration.

I suspect this is where writing is headed whether the AI-detection industry likes it or not. So yes, I use AI to write. I use it enthusiastically. I am not embarrassed by it, I am not trying to hide it, and I don't need a piece of software assigning percentages to my paragraphs to tell me whether the ideas in them belong to me. I know where the ideas came from.

The real test shouldn't be whether AI helped me write something. Ask whether I actually believe what I published. Ask whether I understand it. Ask whether I can explain it, defend it, and expand upon it. Ask whether there is actually something of me in what you are reading. Those are meaningful questions about authorship.

And if the answer is yes, I have no hesitation whatsoever putting my name at the bottom.

AI may have helped me write it. But I am the one who had something to say.