Hey Guys, I use AI!

And so does everyone

Let’s stop pretending. Everyone on Substack is using AI. If you think they aren’t, you’re high. I know because I am (using AI, not high), and I’ve been doing it for a while.

My process isn’t complicated. I sit down and write about a page, maybe 450 words. It’s not elegant. It’s not structured. It’s basically a brain dump. Half sentences, ideas that don’t quite connect yet, things I’d say out loud but that look ridiculous when you see them on the screen. It’s intellectual vomiting. A rough sketch of what I’m trying to say.

Then I paste it into AI and say something like, “Hey, give me an essay.”

And it does. (The tell is a paragraph, then a skipped line, then one sentence, preferably short and under 6 words).

I wrote the parenthetical part of the above.

But here’s the thing people misunderstand about that step. The machine isn’t doing the thinking. It isn’t generating the ethics, the argument, or the moral framework. All of that was already there in the messy words I wrote first. What the machine is doing is what editors have always done: taking raw thought and making it readable. AI doesn’t think. It formats.

When someone reads something I publish, they’re still reading my ideas, my worldview, my sense of what’s right and wrong. The machine is just making them palatable enough that someone might actually read the whole thing instead of quitting halfway through because I wrote it like a guy ranting after 2 IPA’s (which, guess what? I sometimes am).

That last sentence was all mine, just to be clear.

After that first pass, I go back over it again. I cut things. I add things. I adjust the tone. I put back the parts that sound like me and strip out the parts that sound like a corporate memo. Usually, that last step takes longer than the first. But the bones of the essay, the point of it, the reason it exists, came from the original brain dump.

AI wrote that entire last paragraph with me editing 3-6 words and deleting one sentence I didn’t like.

I’m writing about this because once you start using AI this way, you begin to recognize it everywhere. You see the rhythm in the sentences. The smoothing out of rough ideas. The slightly polished cadence that shows up when someone takes a messy draft and runs it through the machine.

Left, right, doesn’t matter. Everyone’s doing it. And honestly, I think it’s making the discourse better.

For most of human history, the ability to communicate ideas clearly was limited by writing skill. There were plenty of people with good insights who simply couldn’t express them well on paper. Their ideas died somewhere between their brain and the page because they didn’t have the craft to make them readable.

AI is closing that gap.

I’m not a writer. I’ve never claimed to be one. Writing isn’t my profession, yet (but maybe a book deal coming soon). But I might actually be a thought leader, of sorts. Those are two completely different things.

The ability to generate ideas about power, ethics, leadership, or society isn’t the same skill as writing elegant sentences. For a long time, we’ve treated those skills as interchangeable, which meant the best writers often became the dominant voices in public debate simply because they could write well enough to be read.

Now that’s changing. A guy with something to say can write 450 honest words and let a machine help him shape them into something readable.

That matters, because the ideas themselves matter right now.

We’re living through a moment where authoritarianism is making another run. And the strategy hasn’t changed much from the last hundred years. It works by appealing to men through a distorted idea of strength. In that narrative, strength isn’t something used to protect others or uphold responsibility. It’s something used to elevate yourself.

Power for its own sake. Dominance as identity (Super AI sentence, but I like it).

It’s a seductive message because it flatters insecurity while pretending to celebrate toughness. But it’s an incomplete understanding of strength. Real strength, historically, has always been tied to obligation: to using power for the benefit of others, not just yourself.

If you want to start an authoritarian movement, you need to tell people with muscles that they are being fucked somehow: the playbook never changes.

I wrote that sentence, all by my big-boy self.

I have ideas about how that works and why it’s dangerous; I want those ideas out in the world. I want people to hear them. AI helps me do that. Not because it thinks for me, but because it translates what I’m already thinking into something readable enough that the conversation can actually happen.

So yes, I use AI to write. A lot of people on Substack do. Probably more than anyone wants to admit. Maybe literally everyone?

(Definitely all the #resistance types such as myself who, like me, used to have tens of thousands of Twitter followers before Elon).

Just don’t make the mistake of thinking that means the ideas themselves are artificial. The ideas are still human. The machine is just the copy editor.

And please, whatever you do, don’t tell me I’m a good writer. I scraped through Harvard Medical School by the skinniest skin of my teeth. But I’ve always been honest, because, honestly, I think that’s more important.