On AI-Assisted Writing

There is real discomfort around writing made with the help of AI. Some of it is justified. Some of it is misdirected. Most of it comes from treating AI use as a single condition, as if the only choices were human writing or AI slop.

That frame is too crude.

The false binary

Writing now sits on a spectrum. At one end is a piece researched, written, edited, and published entirely by a human. At the other is a piece generated by a model with little or no human judgment involved. Most serious use sits between those points.

A person may use AI to explore a topic, check grammar, improve flow, challenge an argument, summarize sources, or restructure a draft. Those are not the same act. They do not carry the same authorship claim, and they should not be judged as if they do.

“AI slop” names a real thing: lazy automated publishing, sprayed into the world because it is cheap to produce. But the phrase often gets used as if it settles every case. It does not. There is a meaningful difference between replacing judgment and using a tool to support judgment.

The authorship claim

The sharpest reaction makes sense when a publisher presents a piece as if it came entirely from their own hand while quietly outsourcing most of the thinking and writing to a model. The objection is not only about the tool. It is about the implied deception. The reader is being asked to attribute effort, authorship, and judgment to someone who may not have supplied much of any of it.

That is why the reaction feels close to the reaction people have to plagiarism. It is not exactly the same act, but it touches the same nerve. Someone is taking credit for intellectual work in a way that misrepresents what they contributed. There is a kind of chest-puffing in it: look at what I made, look at what I thought, look at what I wrote.

If that claim is false, people are right to feel manipulated. The distrust does not only come from the reader being duped. It comes from the writer trying to borrow authority they did not earn.

Why code feels different

Code seems to provoke a different reaction. AI-assisted programming is already common, and although people argue about its risks, the discussion is usually less morally charged than it is with prose. Part of the reason is that code has to do something. It has to run. It has to satisfy a requirement. Its behavior can be tested, inspected, and verified.

None of that makes AI-generated code safe or good. A piece of software can be functionally complete and still be insecure, brittle, unmaintainable, or wrong in ways that only become visible later. “Vibe coding” may produce something that appears to work, but appearance is not correctness. In software, the consequences eventually surface. Bad code creates operational debt, security risk, and failure under pressure. The person who ships it, and the people who depend on it, pay the price.

That changes how people perceive AI use in programming. If an experienced developer uses AI to speed up implementation, generate scaffolding, test alternatives, or catch mistakes, the main question is not whether AI was involved. The main question is whether the developer can evaluate the result. Expertise still matters because the output has to survive contact with reality.

Writing does not fail in the same empirical way. It can sound fluent while being hollow. It can appear thoughtful while laundering someone else’s reasoning. It can carry the rhythm of expertise without containing much judgment. A reader can be persuaded that a piece reflects the mind of an individual when very little individual thought went into it. That is the harder problem.

Disclosure belongs up front

I do not think the answer is to pretend AI-assisted writing can be cleanly separated from human writing. It cannot. The boundary is already blurry, and it will only get harder to police as models improve.

Detection tools may estimate whether a piece was written with AI, but I do not know how much trust to place in those tools. More importantly, they put the burden on the reader. If disclosure is absent, the reader has to investigate after the fact.

The publisher knows how the piece was produced. The reader usually does not. Disclosure does not solve every problem, but it gives the reader enough information to make their own decision.

My line

My own position is straightforward. I view AI as a tool in the writing process. I use it to save time, improve clarity, help with structure, catch grammar and spelling issues, and support research. I may use it to test the flow of an argument or identify gaps in a draft.

I do not want AI to decide what I think. I do not want it to replace the act of forming a view. I want it to help me express the view more clearly, check whether the structure holds, and reduce the mechanical drag around writing. That is different from asking a model to generate a finished opinion and publishing it under my name.

Not every reader will draw the line where I do. Some people will reject AI-assisted writing entirely. That is their right. Others will care only about whether the piece was useful, accurate, or enjoyable. That is also defensible. What matters is that they are not forced to make that decision in the dark.

For me, two questions matter more than the purity of the process: did the piece convey something useful, and was the use of AI disclosed honestly?

The first question matters most. If a piece informs me, clarifies something, makes me think, or gives me a useful frame, I am not especially concerned with quantifying exactly which sentence came from a human and which sentence was shaped by a machine. That line is not only hard to measure. It may be the wrong line to focus on. A human can write useless prose without AI. A model can help produce clear prose under human direction. The presence of the tool does not settle the quality of the work.

The second question matters because it affects trust. Disclosure is not a confession. It is context. It tells the reader how the work was made, and it lets them decide how much that matters to them.

Slide rules and calculators

There is an analogy here with slide rules and electronic calculators, though it only goes so far. For a long time, calculation was treated as a learned human skill. Students were expected to know the methods. Engineers and scientists used slide rules as working instruments. The tool was part of the craft, but the person still had to understand scale, estimation, and error.

When electronic calculators arrived, they met real resistance. Some of that resistance was practical. Early calculators were expensive, and schools had to decide whether students could use them on exams. Some of it was cultural. If a machine could handle arithmetic instantly, what happened to the skill people had spent years learning?

The calculators won. They became cheap, ordinary, and eventually invisible. Nobody now treats the presence of a calculator as proof that a result is worthless. We care whether the person using it understands the problem, checks the input, notices impossible answers, and takes responsibility for the result.

The analogy is imperfect. Writing is not arithmetic, and authorship is not the same thing as calculation. But the reaction has a familiar shape. A tool arrives that automates part of a respected human skill. People who value the older craft react with suspicion. Some of that suspicion protects real values. Some of it becomes denial.

The writer’s obligation

AI-assisted writing is not going away. Humans will use it to draft, edit, research, summarize, polish, and sometimes generate entire pieces. Some of that work will be bad. Some will be dishonest. Some will be useful. Some will be better than what the same person could have produced without the tool.

The reader will have to decide what they accept.

My view is that the obligation of the writer is to be honest about the process, responsible for the claims, and serious about the reasoning. If AI helps with that, I see no reason to pretend otherwise.

Then again, the age of slide rules gave us the Saturn V rocket and the SR-71 Blackbird, engineering feats we have not really matched in an age dominated by calculators and computers. Maybe that holds true for code as well as prose. Maybe the high-water mark for those forms of authorship is already behind us. I sure hope not.

And yes, AI did assist me during the writing of this article.