I always end my posts with a disclosure, not a disclaimer. I’m not covering my ass. I’m telling you what’s honestly true about my process. I write, AI edits.
In the past 20 years I’ve made exactly 3 New Year’s resolutions. I broke the first two. The third was this year when I resolved to write 30 minutes each day for a year. Depending how loosely you define “writing,” I’ve kept that one. Some of the writing is for me alone. Some of it is for my intimate circle. And some of it is for this audience. All of it is to get the thoughts in my head out into the world. My head is messy and jumbled; I need an editor.
I’m not a natural writer. I enjoy it, but it is a labor of love for me. I struggle to turn my random thoughts and ideas that make perfect sense to me into something other humans can consume.
I write nearly every day. At least thirty minutes, usually more. Sometimes it's typing notes at 11:15 PM. Sometimes it's a voice memo on the way to a farmer’s market at 5 AM. What I write is rough, unstructured, and way too long. It’s stream of consciousness. I only know where I’m starting and no idea where I’m going. It’s a mess y’all, a sloppy, sloppy mess.
That's where AI comes in. I use Claude, my bestie without testes, as my editor. Here’s what I do.
Step 1: I write whatever random thoughts want to spill out of my head and tell Claude, “here’s what I got”
Step 2: Claude wades through the muck and separates what’s worth telling from what’s worth trashing
Step 3: I consider Claude’s suggestions and write the piece in my voice with my words
Sometimes Claude writes a line and I use it. Usually, Claude sounds like a robot. The test is always the same: does this sound like something I would actually say? If I wouldn’t say it, you won’t read it.
Claude is great at finding actual insights inside my mess. I'll write 2,000 words of raw material and Claude will say, "the piece is actually about this one thing you glossed over, and everything else is setup." I imagine that’s how a good human editor works.
Claude is terrible at being me. It hasn’t lived my life. It doesn't know that I call 2 PM "nap o'clock." It doesn't know that my great-grandmother's pilon was bigger than me. It doesn't know that my first resolution was to live a simpler life. Or that my second resolution was to go to Burning Man, sorry Mandy. Those details come from a singular life, mine. Not even Claude Mythos can hallucinate my lived experiences.
I get why people are concerned about AI writing. AI slop is insidious and it’s not going away. Full posts, full articles, full newsletters written entirely by AI and published under a human name, without disclaimer or disclosure. Not cool and not good reading.
But is all AI writing slop? Here’s where I land on slop vs. not. "Slop" lacks depth and doesn't move ideas forward. It only regurgitates previous ideas. I recognize it when after consuming it I haven’t changed, learned anything or had my opinions challenged. Slop wastes my time. Notice, that definition is not exclusive to AI writing.
Every word in every post comes from my life. Every story happened to me. Every number is real. Every opinion is mine. The AI helps me say it, so you’ll understand me.
My process is certainly sloppy, but the results?
Disclosure: I write these posts. AI helps me edit them.