AI carries hella baggage right now. And rightfully so in many ways. I’m aware of that, which is why I want to be transparent about how it fits into my writing practice — not as some sort of disclaimer, but as context.
I’m not arguing for or against AI here (that’s for another post). This is an attempt to describe how AI actually shows up in my process and what work I ask it to do.
Over time, I’ve come to better understand what matters most to me about communication. Not just whether a thought survives the journey from my head to someone else’s, but whether it arrives with its meaning intact. Clarity matters, but clarity by itself isn’t enough. Meaning doesn’t travel efficiently, it travels expressively.
If clarity were the only goal, the problem would already be solved. Language can be made smooth, structure can be made tidy. But something essential gets lost when everything is sanded down to its most legible form. Tone disappears. Hesitation vanishes. The traces of thinking — the pauses, the friction, the uncertainty — get edited out. What remains may be readable, but it’s often lifeless.
That’s the line I’m careful not to cross.
Where AI helps is in reducing friction between thought and expression. ADHD and executive dysfunction add drag to that process — not in a dramatic way, but in the steady resistance of starting, holding context, and deciding where to begin when everything feels equally urgent. AI gives me a way to externalize that pressure instead of letting it collapse inward. It lets thoughts move out of my head and into a space where they can be rearranged, tested, and questioned.
I don’t struggle with a lack of words. If anything, I struggle with surplus. Too many sentences want to exist at the same time. Using a tool to create provisional structure lets me work with that overflow instead of fighting it.
In that sense, AI belongs alongside notebooks, outlines, conversations, editors, and whiteboards — things we already accept as part of thinking rather than evidence that thinking has failed. For me, it functions as a thinking surface: somewhere thoughts can land before they know what they are.
The real work happens in the interaction. I describe what I’m trying to say, adjust tone, reshape phrasing, and discard what doesn’t feel true. The value isn’t in what comes back, but in what the exchange reveals — where my thinking is loose, where it’s overconfident, where it hasn’t earned its conclusions yet.
Left alone, language tends toward smoothness. Smoothness implies completion. Completion implies certainty. I’m rarely interested in that. I want writing that shows its seams — not as a performance of vulnerability, but as an honest record of thought in motion.
A lot of that honesty shows up for me as wordplay. Juxtaposition, metaphor, irony, paradox — language that stretches instead of behaving. I’m drawn to phrases that carry tension, that mean more than one thing at once, that don’t collapse immediately into a single reading. That elasticity isn’t decorative. It’s structural. It’s how I keep complexity from being flattened into slogans.
This is also why I tend to ask for feedback rather than fixes. I want to know where a piece loses momentum, what assumptions it’s quietly making, and what breaks if the reader doesn’t already agree with me. The point is examination, not correction.
Clarity still matters. I write constantly, and the goal isn’t speed or output. The goal is alignment — between what I mean and what actually arrives. That alignment includes responsibility. Everything that ends up here does so because I chose it. Most sentences are rewritten. Some are removed entirely. If something doesn’t sound like me, it doesn’t survive.
That doesn’t mean anything here is final. Writing, for me, is iterative by default. Publishing doesn’t conclude the process; it exposes it. Revision continues because thinking continues.
Tools shape thought, language shapes thought, writing shapes thought (all which are, arguably, ‘technologies’ in of themselves) — and vice versa. What matters isn’t whether tools are involved, but whether their influence remains visible and examined.
I’m less interested in perfect clarity than in faithful transmission. Less interested in polished certainty than in writing that still has a pulse.