No more writing with AI

I have always liked but struggled to write. I’ve had various blogs over the years (Blogspot, Wix, Wordpress, Substack) and now you’re here at my personal website. I think my best blogging attempt was in 2016 when I was studying abroad in Austria and had a concrete subject to blog about - traveling, cultural differences, and updating my friends and family at home. But otherwise, my blogging felt canned, stale, and inauthentic. I was writing just to write, but I couldn’t escape all these little tropes and overused sentence structures. So all those other blogs got trashed.

Earlier this year when I heard that people were using AI to write, I thought that it would help my writing. My LinkedIn feed was full of people instructing on how to use AI as a writing partner and editor, and I tried leaning into that. When I got a Claude subscription I thought that it would be less noticeable because Claude was supposed to be the best writing model, but I went too far and would send a half-baked idea to Claude and have it write an entire outline and guide me through the creative process.

Rather than improving my writing, it stunted my ability to think creatively. Instead of having to sit in the discomfort of writer’s block, I would quickly “unblock” myself by chatting with AI and finding a way forward. I think this has its useful applications, but for me, it prevented me from having to actually work harder to clarify my own thoughts. It was a shortcut that resulted in AI slop.

We all know the hallmarks of AI-generated writing… emdashes everywhere, “not this but that” structure, single sentences as their own punchy paragraph. I tried removing all these known issues, but it still did not fix the problem that the ideas generated by AI were not my own. I would give the starting prompt, but by the end of the writing process, my voice was lost.

I’d like to become a better writer but after this year, I realize that will not help by leaning on AI. I really liked this quote from Chocolate Knox at a recent Crosspolitic conference:

AI is overhyped. It will never be God. That job is filled… It will never be man. That job is filled. The God who we serve has already put someone in that position. God has one crowning glory of his creation. You.

My writing with AI felt stale and overdone because AI simply cannot be creative. Creativity is a gift given to man by the Creator of creativity. With all that in mind, I’m going into 2026 abandoning AI for writing. To get better at writing, I’m going to focus on reading more articles and books from writers I admire, and writing more to do the reps.

And just for the record - this article did NOT go through AI before publishing 😉

Thanks for reading!