AI Wrote It. It Wasn't Me.

The Editor-in-Chief: Turning AI Into Your Creative Partner

I had the big idea. I gave it to AI. What came back was a bullet list of general statements that could have belonged to anyone.

It wasn't me. It wasn't even good.

Here's the honest part. People have called me creative for most of my career. In reflection, I don't think that's quite right. I'm an early adopter of other people's good ideas. Maybe that's why AI appeals to me — it's the fastest way to get someone else's idea in front of me so I can do what I actually do well: shape it.

But shaping only works if you catch the moment it stops being yours.

I was reading Doris Kearns Goodwin's An Unfinished Love Story around the same time this happened. She describes how presidential speeches got written in the 1960s — not one person alone, but a big idea passed to a research team, drafted, then handed back and forth between speechwriter and president until it sounded like him and only him. The president never let go of the final say. He just didn't do the labor alone.

That's the difference between what I wanted from AI and what I almost got.

The AI that helped me write this post did exactly what Goodwin's speechwriting teams did. It researched. It drafted. It asked me questions I hadn't thought to ask myself. But the bullet list — the first pass — that was AI trying to be the president, not the team. I had to reject it. Rewrite the big idea in my own words. Make it argue the way I argue.

The finished piece is still mine. Every sentence passed back through me before it left.

If you're using AI in your work, ask yourself which one you're doing. Are you handing over the big idea and hoping something usable comes back? Or are you staying in the room — reading every draft, rejecting what isn't you, refining until it is?

The tool doesn't decide that. You do.

What's the last thing you let go out that wasn't quite you?