I Wrote This Myself: How to Mean It in the Age of AI
I was sitting in the line at the pharmacy drive-thru window, just enjoying the quiet. There was TS’s You Need To Calm Down still playing in my head from the morning. My daughter has become obsessed. She’s four. It’s been a long time since I got to sit still for that long; no one to listen to, nothing to say. I didn’t want the line to move.
I spend a lot of time keeping up with what people are saying: group chats, threads, forums, boards… so much time that I can start to feel like I’ll never be ready to participate. And between construction workers, artists, professors, corporate baddies, and activists, I am the luckiest listener in the world.
Having people around who are willing to share their perspectives with you is special. Being surrounded by so many diverse perspectives is magic. I am grateful, but I tend to be slow to respond because I want to understand the Conversation, which is a mess. Look, I’m doing it even now when I should be getting to the point. Because I want for you what I also want for myself, I want us to understand the context of our content.
So, I was watching one of the group chats talk about good AI prompts, while the other one reposted each other’s reels about how much water a server farm steals from the surrounding rural cities. Let’s start there.
So many of the signals (that is, of the rhetorical variety) can be broken down into FOR and AGAINST.
“I am against AI* because of its high environmental and social cost.” to “I am for AI as an unavoidable future wherein I can save time analyzing large data sets.”
Both positions name real stakes. But when we stop there, we’re still missing the deeper patterns shaping those stakes. FOR and AGAINST is tidy, but it’s also a trap; this binary makes us feel like we’ve chosen a side when we’ve really only chosen to stall. When we listen closely, the same deeper tensions keep surfacing, regardless of the technology.
Defining Reality
Natural x Artificial
We argue over whether something feels “real” or “fake,” when what we’re really deciding is which parts of reality we’re willing to count. You’ve heard there’s nothing new under the sun, right? Just several millennia later, and it's still true.
We weren’t born with our hot takes. They’re shaped by what we accept as reality. You can see it in the debates over synthetic voices narrating audiobooks; is the story less ‘real’ if the voice is? And once we’ve decided what counts as real, the next fight is over how it got here.
Methods of Making
Created x Generated
There’s a difference between building with your own hands and producing with a prompt, even if both make something new. The work of creating leaves marks on you: muscle memory, pattern recognition, the quiet confidence of knowing why a choice works because you’ve wrestled with it yourself. Generating skips that apprenticeship. And if you’re feeling rich enough in understanding to shortchange your own thought process, do you feel cheated taking in someone else’s generated content?
Assigning Responsibility
Ownership x Authorship
You CAN own the output without ever shaping the thinking that made it. Ownership is a title; authorship is a trail of choices, compromises, and intentions that only exist because you were there to make them. Think of a ghostwritten speech: the politician delivers it, owns it, takes the credit, but the author is the one who built its logic and chose every word. The more distance you have from that trail, the less claim you have to the work’s meaning. And if you’re willing to skip that authorship in your work, how much trust are you placing in work authored, or claimed, by someone else?
Accepting Responsibility
Composition x Amplification
Creating the message and boosting the message are not the same kind of work, or responsibility. Composition means building the thing from the ground up (even and especially when that thing is a response), wrestling with what to say and how to say it. Amplification is what happens when that work is cut, clipped, or quoted to fit a new stage. Think of a research paper distilled into a single chart on social media, the methods, limitations, and reasoning disappear, but the headline statistic goes viral. If you’re satisfied working in amplification alone, how much of your perspective is really yours, and how much is borrowed momentum?
Cultivating Certainty
Judgment x Verdict
A verdict is the decision you carry away; judgment is the ground you stand on when you make it. You can see the gap in something as ordinary as shopping online. A five-star rating might get you to click “buy,” but it can’t tell you if those stars came from real customers, paid placements, or a botnet of fake praise. Writing the review yourself after weeks of use is different; you know the trade-offs, the surprises, the dealbreakers. We all want ways to move faster, but how much certainty are we willing to trade for speed?
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It is as it always was that we are being asked to be responsible to one another in the face of our ever-growing complexity. The question is, what are we going to do with this responsibility?
When it comes to communication and AI, the price is as high for our connections to each other and ourselves as it is for whoever winds up “paying for” the water and power bills of the data centers running it. With that in mind, some questions for us to evaluate whether or not it is worth it. Or the same question for the MBAs… are we calculating the full costs in speed or scale, in credibility, in clarity, and the communities our work touches, or just the upside that fits on the slide?
Deciding whether or not to use generative AI is very much a you question… as is all new technology assimilation. But here’s a kind of Bechdel Test for generative AI use:
I can basically explain the process, not just the prompt, to someone else who understands the work. (Defining Reality)
I can choose to do the part of the work that shapes my own thinking and growth. (Methods of Making)
I can spot and fix errors in the AI’s output because I understand the subject matter deeply. (Accepting Responsibility)
I can point to a clear reason for using AI that makes the final work better, not just quicker. (Assigning Responsibility)
I can account for costs in clarity, credibility, connection, and environmental impact, and they still balance in my favor. (Cultivating Certainty)
If you can’t clear that bar, maybe it’s not “worth it” yet.
FOR or AGAINST
Where do I stand? With you, of course. With your thoughts, your experiences, your perspective. I don’t want to get cut out of making meaning with you, because we decided we only have to mean “it” sometimes.
Do you know yourself well enough to correct a statistical inference? Do you trust it to be more you than you are? Would you turn in work you don’t understand?
See, I wrote this myself.
When we’re alone and no one is watching, and the facsimile of near-perfect immediate gratification is so close at hand… do you show up?