Writing With AI (And Still Being the Author)

There’s a growing discomfort around AI in creative spaces.

Using ChatGPT has started to feel like a confession.
As if admitting it means admitting you stopped thinking.
Stopped creating.
Stopped being the author.

I don’t share that fear.

I use AI. And I don’t create less because of it.
I create differently. And with more intention.

I don’t ask AI to write for me.
I ask it to think with me.

Sometimes it helps me brainstorm.
Sometimes it helps me organize ideas that are already there.
Sometimes it provokes questions I hadn’t dared to ask yet.
Sometimes it helps me see the structure hiding inside a mess of thoughts.

It enters my process at different moments – beginning, middle, revision.
Not as a shortcut, but as a guide.

What AI gives me most is not better sentences.
It gives me better thinking.

I like to think of it this way:
a pianist needs the keys to make music.
The keys are not the music.
They don’t choose the melody.
They don’t feel the rhythm.
They don’t decide when silence matters.

The pianist does.

AI, to me, is a set of keys.
The music is still mine.

There’s something important that often gets lost in this conversation:
AI doesn’t have a voice.
It reflects the voice of the person using it.

Ask shallow questions, you’ll get shallow answers.
Bring lived experience, nuance, contradiction – that’s what comes back.

Every output carries the fingerprint of the operator.
AI doesn’t erase authorship.
It exposes it.

And, yes, there are limits.

AI didn’t live my life.
It didn’t survive depression.
It doesn’t know what it feels like to mother, to migrate, to lose language, to rebuild identity.
It doesn’t carry memory in the body.
It doesn’t understand silence – it only approximates it.

It knows patterns of language.
Not consequences.
Not grief.
Not love.

That’s why the responsibility remains human.

Writers have always used tools.
Dictionaries. Editors. Workshops. Beta readers.
What changed now is speed and access – not authorship.

Being the author isn’t about typing every word alone.
It’s about deciding which words stay.
What they mean.
And why they exist.

I don’t fear judgment anymore.
Anyone who understands AI – and understands themselves – knows the difference between assistance and substitution.

I know my creative capacity.
And I know how to use tools without disappearing inside them.

I remain the author.

AI is simply a room I sometimes walk into, carrying my voice, my questions, my limits, and my responsibility.

The music still comes from me.