Not a Bot

I wrote the previous essay after an entirely unscripted coaching session with more than a dozen women. After the session, which was intensely personal for several of us, I spent several hours writing about the things we learned together. I considered the transcript and then worked really hard to make sure that anonymity was respected and meaning was preserved. Then—just for the heck of it—I ran my polished essay through Substack’s AI detector. The result was 86% AI. I was surprised, incredibly frustrated, and more than a little discouraged. I sent the whole thing to a dear friend who was in the live meeting and who has also been an editor for me for a decade or so. She knows my writing very well. I admit that I told her that I’m ready to be finished with Internet witch hunts. She counseled caution and quiet.

I went back to the essay, still in drafts, and I kept messing with it. Changing phrases here and there, playing with words as one does. Ran it back through the AI detector, just to see. Now it’s 90% AI. None of the editing I did was assisted editing. All of it was me trying to polish a piece that matters to me a great deal.

What an insidious way for whatever power that is at work to silence people for whom writing is how to make sense of an inner world! What a way to cast aspersions on people who read voraciously and whose writing is formed by hours of exposure to print every day. This all feels like the fatal gut punch—decades of working to write well and to make sense of life in print only to have a bot say it’s a bot doing the thinking and the work of writing.

I came to Substack less than a year ago because I missed blogging longform writing. I’ve worked hard to integrate my live coaching and live bible studies here, where they are accessible to people who have not joined the live conversation. It takes hours of work to do that. And I’ve been committed to doing the work.

But this is not what I had hoped it would be. Not by a long shot.

Oh, the protest comes, but if you leave, hasn’t the insidious force won?

Oh, but if I don’t, comes my reply, can I maintain my sanity and my peace? This feels like a house of mirrors. At what cost does writing come here?