How AI helps me write.

So, it's time to be honest.

AI has helped me write all of these blog posts.

Let's get into it.

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Flashback to Spring, 2025. I was confident in my academic writing. Frankly, very confident. As an English major and straight-A student, I can probably pump out a decent ten-page paper in my sleep. I know I'm tooting my own horn, but a professor once told me that it's good to have a healthy amount of hubris (and trust, I've ran with this advice).

At this time, AI-generated writing was becoming ubiquitous. Class syllabi started to include AI guidelines and certain Chat GPT "indicators" got widely recognized (RIP to the em dash, but I've personally always preferred some parentheses). My job (i.e. writing) was being replaced before my eyes!!

That spring was the semester I decided to join radio as a blogger. I was incredibly embarrassed to say that I was starting my own blog. Who did I think I was? It was one thing to turn in an assignment a professor requests, and another to write something completely unsolicited. It felt very self-indulgent. I wasn't even sure what I wanted to write about yet, I just knew I wanted to write.

On average, I read around 50 books annually. And I read some essays and articles here and there. And I love movies and TV shows. And I do have the habit of doomscrolling. I am probably the number one media consumer of all time. Consuming is one of my favorite hobbies, but it is a double-edged sword. Through consuming, I've learned and reflected and felt, but ultimately this habit put me in a constant state of complacency. I had holed myself into the role of consumer so deeply, that the idea of creating almost felt illegal.

Creating was for professionals; consuming was for the rest of us.

Then AI freed me from my shackles.

I'd always prided myself at how concise my writing was. How efficient I could be with my words, how I could place transition words for optimal flow, how I wouldn't stray from the task at hand. This was what I was taught in school, and this was what I was being rewarded for. And apparently, this was the style gen-ai was trained for too.

There are some things I won't give up. You will have to take negative parallelisms and the rule of threes from my cold dead hands. But seeing such soulless writing over and over and over again, made me wonder what good writing really is. I wanted to be more human.

Even if I write the sh*ttiest blog post known to man, at least I did it with my brain. Looking dumb or messy no longer concerned me as much. I want to leave my thumbprints on every sentence. Evidence of my consciousness being there.

AI has inadvertently helped me become less afraid to share these pieces of myself. So, in its own twisted way, AI is the reason I even have this blog.

That first semester, my goal was to get comfortable. Last semester, my goal was to develop my "voice." For my last semester, I want to ground my writing with my life experiences.

Thank you for reading,

Sputnik Sweetheart ♡

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[All images sourced from Pinterest]