A newsletter is a very personal thing. When I subscribe to yours, I am putting my trust in you that you will send me something of your making and that it will be a result of your own labour, your lived experience, and your expertise.

When you use AI to generate text and send that to me through your newsletter without announcing it as such, you are of course disappointing me, but you are also underselling yourself. I know there is a bunch of advice out there about “using AI to write” and make your life easy, but human connection is supposed to take effort. It’s not supposed to be automated.

The advice that works for content farms that are only interested in filling web pages with keyword-laden text is not advice that will do an actual writer any good. In a world where many are using ChatGPT to “write”, what differentiates you — the writer — from the rest, is the fact that you can actually write. You don't have to flush your uniqueness down the drain by jumping on this already creaky bandwagon.

Be a person, not the machine-generated approximation of one. There is a difference between writing and generating text. It should not be forgotten, least of all by a writer.

I was recently talking with a writer friend about what makes me feel there is something icky about using ChatGPT (or a similar tool) to “write”. They said that they use the tool to find alternative ways to express something they have written.

The implication I found odd was that the way something is expressed is not a core part of writing, only the information being conveyed is. I happen to think that while the idea being conveyed is important, the way someone expresses something is an equally important part of what makes their writing theirs. In fact, it is the most human part of the process. We all write about similar things. What makes one work distinct from another is what we bring to it.

Thinking of AI-generated text as writing devalues the individuality of someone’s work. I think the struggle of choosing the right words to say something is a key part of writing. The source of that choice, one’s lived experience, one’s preferences, one’s sense of aesthetics, is all important.