Technology

I spent this morning sitting with this exchange, coffee in hand, reading back over what I had written.

I’m not especially interested in responding to the insults. And I’m going to set aside the argument about how AI systems are trained, plagiarism, consent, compensation, and so on. Those are legitimate ethical questions and I share them, but they are a different conversation.

The part that stayed with me was the simpler claim underneath all of that:

"You didn’t write this."

And the more I thought about it, the more I realized that my original answer had blurred together several different things.

I had been treating “writing,” “authorship,” “ownership,” and “responsibility” almost as synonyms.

They aren’t.

You can originate an idea, develop an argument, direct how it is expressed, edit it, approve the final version, and take responsibility for publishing it without necessarily having composed every sentence yourself.

Nickiwest had responded to my original comment and said "That sounds more like the job of an editor than the job of a writer." and that got me thinking about my old work as an art director for a studio.

I could come up with the concept, find references, explain what I wanted, reject drafts, change direction, combine ideas, and go through revision after revision until the finished image expressed what I had in mind.

That was real creative work.

But I still wouldn’t say I drew the picture.

The idea might have been mine. The direction might have been mine. The judgment might have been mine.

The drawing wasn’t.

I think AI creates a similar complication with language.

If I give an LLM a thought and it produces a sentence, then no, I did not necessarily compose that sentence in the ordinary sense.

If I argue with it, reject things, rearrange them, rewrite parts, refine distinctions, change the reasoning, and decide what survives, then I have obviously contributed something substantial. But calling every form of that contribution “writing” may sometimes be too simple.

Sometimes “writer” will be perfectly natural.

Sometimes “editor,” “director,” or simply “AI-assisted” may be more accurate.

What interests me more than the title is what happens during the process.

I can put a half-formed thought into language and look at it from the outside.

Sometimes I read a sentence and realize, that sounds like something I believe, but it goes further than I mean.

Sometimes two ideas I had been treating as the same turn out not to be the same at all.

Sometimes an argument looks convincing in my head and falls apart the moment I see the missing step written down.

Sometimes the model gives me wording I dislike, and figuring out why I dislike it forces me to understand my own position better.

Then I put that thought back in and try again.

The result I am looking for is not better prose, it is a better thought.

That is basically what happened to me this morning.

My original position was that the work was mine because I chose it, shaped it, approved it, put my name on it, and accepted responsibility for it.

I still think responsibility matters enormously. If I publish bad reasoning, false claims, unsupported accusations, or generic slop, I do not get to shrug and say, “The AI wrote it.”

I chose to publish it.

But I no longer think responsibility settles the question of who “wrote” something.

An editor can be responsible for publishing a piece without having written it. An art director can shape an image without having drawn it.

So now I think the more interesting questions are smaller ones.

Who originated the idea?

Who developed the argument?

Who decided what belonged?

Who noticed the mistakes?

Who revised the thinking?

Who directed the expression?

Who actually composed the prose?

Those answers may not always point to the same person, and maybe that is fine.

What I don’t think follows is that the human contribution disappears the moment a machine becomes involved.

My ideas do not disappear. My judgment does not disappear. The things I accept, reject, revise, and ultimately stand behind do not disappear.

But neither do I need to pretend I personally composed every sentence if I didn’t.

I’m comfortable with that distinction.

And I think it leaves me somewhere more interesting than where I started.

What fascinates me about A.I. is the strange process of having a thought, seeing it reflected back, noticing where it fails, and slowly discovering what I actually mean; what I believe.

This reply is a product of that process. I do not care what title we end up giving the result, I enjoyed spending my morning with it.