How I Write

Since artificial intelligence has complicated the meaning of the word author, perhaps I should explain exactly how the articles and essays on this site are produced because I use a lot of help.

These are my tools:

• A computer, because carving an article into a stone tablet seems unnecessarily labor-intensive.
• A keyboard, rather than manufacturing each letter myself.
• A word processor to write, delete, copy, paste, move, and reorganize words and paragraphs.
• Spellcheck to catch words I mistype.
• A grammar checker to identify grammatical mistakes I don't notice.
• A dictionary to verify what words mean.
• A thesaurus to find words that might express an idea better than the first word that came to mind.
• A calculator, because long division is not an essential component of authorship.
• A spreadsheet when numbers need more organization than a calculator can conveniently provide.
• Search engines to locate information other people have published.
• Websites created by other people to make that information available.
• Books containing knowledge accumulated by people I have never met.
• Databases assembled by other people to organize facts I didn't personally collect.
• Journalists who investigated events I didn't personally witness.
• Researchers who performed experiments and investigations I didn't personally conduct.
• Scientists who discovered things I didn't personally discover.
• Historians who documented events that happened before I was born.
• Editors who developed conventions for making written communication clearer.
• Style guides containing rules and conventions somebody else figured out.
• Statistics, developed over centuries by mathematicians, to help determine whether numbers actually mean what I think they mean.
• Logic, developed and refined over thousands of years, to help distinguish a valid argument from nonsense.
• Language itself, which I did not invent.
• An alphabet, which I also did not invent.
• Grammar, inherited from generations of people who collectively decided how our language works.
• Punctuation, because apparently readers object when I make them determine where one thought ends and another begins.
• Metaphors, idioms, and rhetorical techniques inherited from countless writers and speakers before me.
• An education, formal and otherwise, built from ideas developed by other human beings.
• Teachers who explained things I didn't previously understand.
• Conversations with other people who challenged, corrected, expanded, and occasionally demolished my ideas.
• Experience, accumulated from decades of being right, being wrong, and occasionally figuring out which was which.
• Memory, an extraordinarily unreliable biological database that nevertheless contributes quite a bit.
• My own previous writing, because apparently I'm allowed to learn from myself.
• Other people's writing, because apparently I'm allowed to learn from them too.
• Coffee, whose contribution to Western literature deserves considerably more scholarly attention.
• A chair, because intellectual achievement becomes surprisingly difficult after several hours of standing.
• Electricity, generated and delivered by people who receive remarkably little authorial credit.
• The Internet, assembled from technologies developed by thousands of engineers and maintained by millions of machines.
• AI, which I use as a researcher, editor, critic, sounding board, devil's advocate, brainstorming partner, and collaborator.
• And finally, my judgment to decide which facts matter, which arguments make sense, which suggestions are useful, which suggestions are garbage, what stays, what goes, what the finished work says, and whether I am willing to put my name on it.

After employing this scandalous collection of intellectual prosthetics, technological shortcuts, accumulated human knowledge, and tools I did not personally invent, I somehow have the audacity to call myself the author.

On Authorship

There has probably never been such a thing as completely unaided human intellectual production.

Every writer stands on an enormous scaffolding constructed by other people. Language, education, books, libraries, calculators, computers, search engines, dictionaries, editors, colleagues, and accumulated human knowledge have always extended what an individual mind can accomplish.

AI is different because the tool can now participate directly in reasoning and language production. That's a significant upgrade, and pretending otherwise doesn't help anyone.

But perhaps that makes the question of authorship more precise rather than less.

The relevant question isn't whether tools were involved. Tools were always involved.

The relevant questions are:

• Who determined the objective?
• Who exercised judgment?
• Who decided what was true?
• Who selected what mattered?
• Who rejected what didn't?
• Who decided when the work was finished?
• And who accepts responsibility for the result?

If the answer to those questions is the person whose name appears at the top, I'm perfectly comfortable calling that person the author.

So, yes, I use AI. I also use a calculator, a dictionary, a thesaurus, a word processor, search engines, books, other people's knowledge, decades of experience, and an alarming quantity of coffee.

The ideas are mine.

I use the tools. I make the judgments. I stand behind the result.

And then we can finally get around to the question that matters:

Was the damn thing worth reading?