A promise.

I was just reading over some of my previous writing and had a moment of clarity. The articles written by me, without the help of A.I., are my favorite. I’ve been relying too heavily on artificial intelligence. Mostly because I hate writing.

I’ve never been a blogger. I’m more of a journaler. Things like headers and paragraph breaks are beyond my judgement. Obviously, I want my words to be readable and relatable. That’s why I use A.I. I don’t trust my own writing to be readable and relatable on its own.

I am most articulate when I start with a strong emotion. It could be any emotion. From that emotion, I just let my fingers fly. Stream of consciousness. Once those thoughts are all extracted from my head, there’s an attempt to polish them. At first, I thought A.I. was helping. "Keep as much of my original phrasing as possible,” I would prompt, “focus only on transitional language, optimal content flow and grammar.” After some back and forth, I would feel pretty good about the output.

But time gives you a different lens.

Reading back, I think I lost my actual voice along the way. Subtle changes to sentence structure, adjective types, tone and confidence were alien to the way I actually felt. For example, I’m actually not that confident. A.I. interprets that as insecurity. Rather, my lack of confidence is rooted in the lack of assurance that I have all the answers. These nuances of tone can impact clarity, which can leave my readers with the wrong idea.

So, I need to make a promise: When it’s me writing, it’s me writing.

Whether it’s for your sake or mine alone, I’m not going to write with A.I. assistance.

First of all, that’s going to force me to be a better writer.

Second, maybe there’s a greater hunger for the authenticity of my raw thoughts anyway.

Ready or not, here we go. Through the smoke!