Ideas by me. Written by AI.

We all use AI. We just don’t like admitting it.

There was a time when saying you spent a lot of time on the internet felt embarrassing. Talking to strangers online was odd. Hanging out on forums was seen as wasting time. “Real life” was somewhere else. People did it anyway, but rarely talked about it openly.

Then the internet became normal. Then essential. Then unavoidable. The shame didn’t disappear overnight, it just quietly stopped making sense.

AI feels like it’s in that same awkward phase.

Everyone uses it. Few admit it.

Writers use it to draft. Designers use it to ideate. Developers use it to explain, refactor, and sanity-check. Lawyers use it to research. Doctors use it to organise notes. Founders use it to think. And yet, many still pretend their work is magically untouched by AI, as if the tool itself somehow corrupts the result.

What we’re really protecting isn’t quality. It’s ego.

There’s this unspoken belief that admitting AI involvement makes the work less legitimate. As if the real value lies in typing every sentence by hand.

That assumption is outdated.

Writing was never the point

For decades, writing has been treated as proof of intelligence. If you could articulate clearly, you were assumed to be smart. AI disrupts that neat equation. Suddenly, the value shifts away from typing ability and towards thinking, judgement, taste, and originality.

That shift makes people uncomfortable. So they hide the tool.

I want to do the opposite.

AI doesn’t decide what I believe. It doesn’t choose my opinions or values. It doesn’t know what matters to me. It just helps me get the words out of my head and onto the page faster.

Being explicit about the process

So I’m planning to do something simple. On my articles, I’ll add a small note:

Ideas by me. Written by AI.

Not as a disclaimer. Not as an apology. As a statement of how work actually happens now.

The ideas are still mine. The responsibility is still mine. If something is wrong, unclear, or poorly thought through, that’s on me. AI didn’t suddenly give me opinions I didn’t already have.

This has happened before

This feels similar to how people once hid the fact that they met friends online, worked remotely, or ran internet businesses. For a while, everyone did it quietly. Then eventually, nobody cared.

I think we’re heading to the same place with AI.

This isn’t new. We’ve done this before.

This is no different from spellcheck, search engines, design software, or the internet itself. Tools change. The human contribution moves upstream.

People once hid the fact that they met friends online, worked remotely, or ran internet businesses. For a while, everyone did it quietly. Then eventually, nobody cared.

AI is following the same arc.

The real discomfort

The uncomfortable part isn’t the tool. It’s what it exposes. Thinking matters more than output now. Judgement matters more than polish. And that’s unsettling if you’ve tied your identity to being “good at writing”.

I’d rather be open about how I work than pretend it’s still 2005.

I’d rather be honest early than defensive later.

Discussion

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