I think the vitriol around AI has crossed into moral absolutism for a lot of people. There are legitimate criticisms of AI, but “AI can be harmful” does not logically mean “all AI use is unethical” or “AI has no useful purpose.” Treating every use as morally equivalent is just hasty generalization and guilt by association.

At some point, “AI is bad” stops being a conclusion and becomes a sacred value. Then useful examples are not considered on their merits, they are dismissed because they threaten the moral position. You can criticize harmful uses of AI without pretending the technology itself has no legitimate use.

Power.

Not a nicer car. Not a better vacation. Not a bigger house.

The ability to buy companies, fund institutions, shape industries, influence politics, and absorb enormous losses without changing your lifestyle.

At a certain point, more money stops buying a better life. It starts buying more control.

deleted by creator

Ah, but how much? Where does me end and the machine begin?

Lets assume you are correct and I had no part in the reply. Here is a 100%, hand to keyboard question from me.

Would you like to talk about what it said?

I spent this morning sitting with this exchange, coffee in hand, reading back over what I had written.

I’m not especially interested in responding to the insults. And I’m going to set aside the argument about how AI systems are trained, plagiarism, consent, compensation, and so on. Those are legitimate ethical questions and I share them, but they are a different conversation.

The part that stayed with me was the simpler claim underneath all of that:

“You didn’t write this.”

And the more I thought about it, the more I realized that my original answer had blurred together several different things.

I had been treating “writing,” “authorship,” “ownership,” and “responsibility” almost as synonyms.

They aren’t.

You can originate an idea, develop an argument, direct how it is expressed, edit it, approve the final version, and take responsibility for publishing it without necessarily having composed every sentence yourself.

Nickiwest had responded to my original comment and said “That sounds more like the job of an editor than the job of a writer.” and that got me thinking about my old work as an art director for a studio.

I could come up with the concept, find references, explain what I wanted, reject drafts, change direction, combine ideas, and go through revision after revision until the finished image expressed what I had in mind.

That was real creative work.

But I still wouldn’t say I drew the picture.

The idea might have been mine. The direction might have been mine. The judgment might have been mine.

The drawing wasn’t.

I think AI creates a similar complication with language.

If I give an LLM a thought and it produces a sentence, then no, I did not necessarily compose that sentence in the ordinary sense.

If I argue with it, reject things, rearrange them, rewrite parts, refine distinctions, change the reasoning, and decide what survives, then I have obviously contributed something substantial. But calling every form of that contribution “writing” may sometimes be too simple.

Sometimes “writer” will be perfectly natural.

Sometimes “editor,” “director,” or simply “AI-assisted” may be more accurate.

What interests me more than the title is what happens during the process.

I can put a half-formed thought into language and look at it from the outside.

Sometimes I read a sentence and realize, that sounds like something I believe, but it goes further than I mean.

Sometimes two ideas I had been treating as the same turn out not to be the same at all.

Sometimes an argument looks convincing in my head and falls apart the moment I see the missing step written down.

Sometimes the model gives me wording I dislike, and figuring out why I dislike it forces me to understand my own position better.

Then I put that thought back in and try again.

The result I am looking for is not better prose, it is a better thought.

That is basically what happened to me this morning.

My original position was that the work was mine because I chose it, shaped it, approved it, put my name on it, and accepted responsibility for it.

I still think responsibility matters enormously. If I publish bad reasoning, false claims, unsupported accusations, or generic slop, I do not get to shrug and say, “The AI wrote it.”

I chose to publish it.

But I no longer think responsibility settles the question of who “wrote” something.

An editor can be responsible for publishing a piece without having written it. An art director can shape an image without having drawn it.

So now I think the more interesting questions are smaller ones.

Who originated the idea?

Who developed the argument?

Who decided what belonged?

Who noticed the mistakes?

Who revised the thinking?

Who directed the expression?

Who actually composed the prose?

Those answers may not always point to the same person, and maybe that is fine.

What I don’t think follows is that the human contribution disappears the moment a machine becomes involved.

My ideas do not disappear. My judgment does not disappear. The things I accept, reject, revise, and ultimately stand behind do not disappear.

But neither do I need to pretend I personally composed every sentence if I didn’t.

I’m comfortable with that distinction.

And I think it leaves me somewhere more interesting than where I started.

What fascinates me about A.I. is the strange process of having a thought, seeing it reflected back, noticing where it fails, and slowly discovering what I actually mean; what I believe.

This reply is a product of that process. I do not care what title we end up giving the result, I enjoyed spending my morning with it.

Oh! I wasn’t sure you would read it, let alone reply. Writing it was a fun little excursion from my day, so I’m glad at least four lines made it through.

My offer still stands if you’d like to posit a position and defend it.

And I meant what I said about ignorance. I would genuinely love to be shown that I’m wrong. Sincerely. I would. Being wrong means there is something for me to learn, something against which to temper the mind.

What do ya say? Want to offer me something more substantial than slop?

A sneer is easier than an answer, and certainty is a lovely refuge when you have no intention of defending it.

You accuse me of surrendering thought to a machine, and then, the moment you are asked to justify that accusation, you surrender thought entirely.

How convenient.

With a wave of the hand, every difficult question disappears. You declare the words contaminated by the tool that helped shape them and thereby absolve yourself of any obligation to consider what they actually say.

No examination. No argument. No possibility of correction.

You accuse me of regurgitating the output of a machine, yet what have you offered in return?

A familiar sneer. A borrowed insult. A conclusion retrieved intact from the cupboard of approved contempt.

You recognize the hated object, produce the expected response, and call the reflex thought.

That is the irony you seem determined not to notice.

My argument from the beginning has been that a machine must be tempered by a human mind. It possesses no responsibility for what it produces. Whatever value emerges from its use depends upon the person capable of examining it, rejecting it, correcting it, shaping it, and finally standing behind it.

But a mind cannot temper anything if it refuses examination itself.

And that is where your position becomes more interesting than your insult.

A mind that refuses examination begins to resemble the very machine you claim to despise. It receives a familiar stimulus, reaches for the familiar pattern, and produces the familiar response without troubling itself over whether the response is true.

Input. Recognition. Output.

The machinery of contempt.

Ignorance itself is no shame. Every one of us is ignorant of almost everything. I have been wrong before and will be wrong again. If you can show me where, I gain something from the correction.

But there is something contemptible in making a virtue of ignorance.

In encountering an argument and proudly announcing that you will not examine it, then mistaking that refusal for discernment. In treating incuriosity as wisdom. In believing that because you have protected yourself from an argument, you have somehow defeated it.

You have not defended your position.

You have insulated it.

Those are not the same thing.

Thought requires a certain vulnerability. You must permit an idea close enough to examine it. You must risk finding weakness in your own position. You must allow the possibility that another person, even one using a tool you despise, might know something you do not.

Without that, certainty does not become strength.

It becomes brittleness.

You tried to cut me with the accusation that I had surrendered my mind to a machine. But in your eagerness to make it, you performed the very surrender you condemn.

You saw the signal.

You retrieved the response.

You refused examination.

You produced the slop.

And so the question remains exactly where I left it:

Will you defend what you believe?

Or is your conviction only strong enough to survive so long as you never allow an argument near it?

I did not say “authorship is when I make a few edits and sign my name to slop.” That is not my argument.

My argument is that authorship is grounded in the origination of the ideas and intent, control over what goes into the work, judgment over how those ideas are expressed, endorsement of the final form, and responsibility for the result. Assistance with the linguistic realization does not, by itself, transfer authorship.

You point out that the machine has no meaning, association, appreciation, or delight in the words. I agree. But I do. That is precisely the distinction I am making. The machine does not know what I mean, care whether it represents me, recognize when an analogy fails, or decide whether an argument is worth defending. I am doing those things.

You seem to be defining “writing” as personally generating the initial sequence of words. Maybe that is where we actually disagree. But that definition cannot simply be assumed and then used to prove that I am not writing. Why should authorship reside specifically in first-pass word generation rather than in the thought, intention, judgment, revision, and control that determine what the final words mean?

That is the argument I am interested in having.

Why?

I was hoping “a writer that doesn’t write” was the conclusion to an argument rather than the entire argument. I’m perfectly happy to be wrong. What I can’t do is respond to an argument you’re keeping to yourself.

I did make an argument. My argument is that authorship is grounded in the origination of the ideas and intent, control over what goes into the work, endorsement of the final form, and responsibility for the result. Assistance with the linguistic realization does not, by itself, transfer authorship.

I’ve thought through that position, refined it, and I’m willing to defend it. Calling AI use “plagiaristic” or a “shortcut” doesn’t actually address the argument.

So which part do you reject: that I originated the ideas, that I exercised control over the final work, that I endorsed it, or that I’m responsible for it? And why?

I think that is a fair comparison, and it is much closer to the conversation I was hoping to have.

I used “writing” and “authorship” pretty broadly in the original comment. I was talking about expressing my thoughts in things like letters, emails, comments, essays, and so on. What has been interesting is watching people get very hung up on the labels “writer” and “author,” then react to what they think I am claiming without really engaging with the process I was describing.

Your editor comparison is interesting because I used to work as an art director, and there are similarities. I did not paint or draw. I would explain an idea in words, hunt down reference images, point to compositions or details I liked, and work with a concept artist through round after round of sketches. I would say, “this is closer,” “that misses the idea,” “combine this with that,” or sometimes realize that my original concept itself needed to change.

I did not draw the artwork, and I would never claim that I did. But I was still doing creative work, and more importantly, the process was refining my own thinking.

That is the part of using AI that interests me most. I give it a thought, see that thought reflected back at me in language, judge what works and what does not, clarify what I actually mean, reject bad reasoning, discover distinctions I had not articulated yet, and then go through the process again.

Sometimes I come out of that process with better prose. More importantly, sometimes I come out of it with a better thought. So whether we ultimately call that “writing,” “editing,” or something else is honestly less interesting to me than what is happening in the process itself. I am not just refining the words. The act of interrogating and refining the words is also refining me.

Interesting. When you want to criticize the argument, the words are mine enough to hold me responsible for them. But when I claim responsibility for those same words, suddenly they’re not mine.

“I don’t write anything but take credit for everything” is a straw man. If you disagree, address what I actually said.

Could you tell me which part of my argument you think is wrong?

That’s my point.

I use AI as a writing tool, not as a substitute for authorship.

The ideas, intent, perspective, and final judgment are mine. I decide what I want to say, what belongs in the piece, what does not, and whether the finished version accurately represents me. AI may help me organize my thoughts, clarify a sentence, improve the flow, or find wording that better expresses what I already mean. That is not fundamentally different from working with an editor, dictating to a transcriber, or revising a draft after receiving feedback.

What matters is that I review the final work, approve it, and put my name on it. By doing that, I take responsibility for every sentence. If the writing is thoughtful, accurate, and effective, I am responsible for those choices. If it is careless, misleading, generic, or full of slop, that is also my responsibility. Blaming the tool would be an attempt to avoid accountability.

AI does not decide what I believe. It does not decide what I am willing to defend. It does not decide what I publish under my name. I do.

The tool may assist with the writing process, but the authorship comes from intention, judgment, selection, revision, and responsibility. The final work is mine because I chose it, shaped it, approved it, and signed my name to it.

Krita had been great for most of my work.

For me, I listen. A lot of long form content is more like a podcast than a video.

I think about her all day long.

That was painfully unfunny.