Writing with AI

If you scroll up through my Telegram channel, or open my first blog posts, you will easily notice how they were completely written with AI. Those very obvious patterns that are very easy to spot, like "this isn't just X, it's Y". I was mostly writing drafts myself, but using AI to "finish the paragraph", and also to completely rewrite the whole draft in the end for the purpose of fixing grammar errors and "improving writing".

I'm now ashamed of that. A lot of time has passed and only recently I stopped using AI like this. Writing has to come fully from myself, otherwise it makes no sense. It also helps to actually think more about what I write. Before I could just drop a bunch of random thoughts into AI and ask it to write a nice post out of it, but as a result I skipped the whole stage of thinking in a structured way that happens when you write things yourself.

I think I changed my mind on all that after seeing hundreds of fully AI-generated posts on X for months. They all look the same. My first posts look this way too when I reread them now. It's soulless, feels cheap, and often provides less value to readers.

I'm not using AI this way anymore, at least for things that actually require some thinking from me. I'm now only using it to fact-check, spot grammar errors and give feedback, but never to rewrite whole chunks of text or to finish my thoughts. I'm writing everything myself, then asking AI to give feedback to me, then changing things myself. For random posts on X, I don't even do these last steps.

But I definitely use AI for boilerplate stuff, like prompts for AI itself or some Slack messages. Those things don't require much thinking from my side anyway. And I think for such cases, it's fine.