Lately, I’ve been sitting with a quiet discomfort—this lingering sense that when I write with AI, I’m somehow cheating the craft. Like I’m skipping the part where the writer wrestles the words into place, alone, in the dark.
That’s the mythology, isn’t it? That real writing is born from solitude, friction, and some kind of sacred suffering.
So when the process becomes more fluid—when the scaffolding of language appears more easily—I question whether I’m still honoring the art. Or whether I’m just dressing up a shortcut in a writer’s robe.
But then a different question emerges:
What if my truest skill isn’t in being the best wordsmith, but in being the clearest thinker?
The most emotionally honest feeler?
The most willing to stay with the mess, without rushing to clean it up?
There’s a Buddhist teaching that asks, “Who is the one who is aware of this thought?”
It nudges us to look past the content of consciousness and into consciousness itself.
So maybe that’s the real practice.
Not writing for writing’s sake.
Not trying to win the literary purity contest.
But attending to the self behind the sentence.
Bringing awareness to what arises, and shaping that into something shareable.
If that’s the case… then the tool (AI or otherwise) matters less than the presence I bring to the process.
And maybe the purity I’ve been chasing isn’t in the prose, but in the perception.
Still pondering.