Some People Don’t Like AI-Generated Stuff
Some people around me are pretty resistant to AI-generated content. Their reasons usually fall into a few buckets: it feels too machine-made, fake at a glance; it wasn’t written by the person themselves, so it has no soul; asking AI to write for you is basically admitting you can’t write.
I get it, but I don’t agree.
My Stance: If You Embrace It, Embrace It Fully
My view is simple: if you’re going to embrace AI, then embrace AI all the way.
Not half-heartedly—using AI to look things up, polish a few sentences, or “check for typos,” while insisting that the main text must be typed out word by word by yourself. To me, that’s the worst deal: you spend the effort, but barely get any of AI’s actual advantages.
I never use AI just for grunt work. I use it for the most central part of the job: expanding ideas, organizing structure, and turning a tangled mess into a clear thread.
How I Use It
Take the most everyday example: I have an idea in my head, usually a very fuzzy one—a sentence, maybe even just a word, or simply the feeling that “there’s something interesting here.” If I force myself to write it out, I often sit there forever and still can’t squeeze out a decent paragraph.
So I throw that vague idea to AI: “I have this feeling—help me develop it.”
Then it immediately expands it into several lines of thought, a few possible structures, maybe even a draft. And that’s when the real work begins: I write toward my own expectations—this point is wrong, kill it; this example is too clichéd, replace it; this tone is too formal, make it more down-to-earth; add a self-deprecating line here.
AI gives me the rough shell. I set the standard. It’s responsible for “more”; I’m responsible for “right.”
The Key Is This: Writing Toward My Expectations
A lot of people think “using AI to write” means letting AI do whatever it wants, then copying and pasting the result. For me, it’s exactly the opposite. The way I use it is to write toward my expectations: before I start, I already have a sense of what the piece should feel like, what stance it should take, and what rhythm it should have. AI is the executor; I’m the director.
So I don’t buy the line that “AI writing has no soul.” The soul isn’t in the act of typing. It’s in the expectation behind it. A hand-written piece of nonsense and a good AI-assisted article—the former doesn’t have a soul either. It’s just “nonsense written by hand.”
Fully Embracing AI Is Actually More Tiring
To be honest: after fully embracing AI, I haven’t become more relaxed. In the past, I couldn’t get the words out. Now I’ve outsourced the “getting stuck” part and saved some energy. But all that saved energy gets spent elsewhere—constantly saying, “No, that’s not right, try another one, push it a little more in that direction.” The weight of thinking has actually become heavier.
Because AI has made “getting something written” too cheap, and cheap things aren’t worth much. What’s valuable is the expectation: what exactly do you want? If you can’t figure that out, the more AI writes, the more it wastes.
So fully embracing AI isn’t giving up thinking. It forces you to move your thinking further upstream.
In the End
In my last post, I complained that “AI is too efficient—so efficient it doesn’t feel like me.” Consider this post my explanation: why I’m still using it, and using it more aggressively than ever.
Because when it comes to writing, typing has never been the point. The point is the stuff AI can never decide for me—what I want. And that’s something I plan to keep for myself.