I’m not historically a writer. AI is actually what helped me ease into it, because it let me work in a mode that felt more approachable. My earlier posts on LinkedIn are obvious signs that I leaned on AI too much. Still my ideas, but I did a lot less of the editing. Over time I’ve pushed hard to correct that. I’ve learned what I like and don’t like in my writing and I spend the time now to make sure my voice comes through.
The hard part is never the painting itself. It’s getting the first colors and shapes down.
The Problem It Solves
I have always been better at editing than creating from scratch. The blank page is where I lose the most time. I usually know what I want to say. The hard part is the bridge between the idea in my head and the first words on the screen. Once there’s something there, even something bad, I can work with it. But getting from nothing to something is the part that costs me the most energy.
This is a pretty common phenomenon when it comes to creation in general. Many people that create run into that same struggle. I’m a painter, and the feeling is the same one I get standing in front of a blank canvas. The hard part is never the painting itself. It’s getting the first colors and shapes down. Once there’s something on the surface I can react to, I know what to do. But that initial commitment, the first marks, that’s where the resistance lives. Writing has always been the same way for me.
What AI does for me is collapse that gap. I dump raw notes into a conversation. Sometimes they’re structured, sometimes they’re messy. But the argument is already there. The points I want to make, the stories I want to tell, the position I’m taking. It’s all in the notes. What comes back is usually a rough draft. Not a good one. But a draft. And that’s all I need. Something on the page that I can start working against.
What Happens After
Once I have that first rough draft, I read through it and start editing. Then I read it again and edit more. I do this at least ten times, usually more. Each pass is doing something different. Early passes are about structure. Does the point I’m trying to get across flow the way it needs to. Are the sections in the right order. Does it read like I would write it. Am I transitioning well between paragraphs.
A huge part of the editing is removal. AI models have patterns baked into them that I can’t stand. The forced quips. The unnecessary transitions that exist to sound clever rather than to move the point forward. Even the punctuation matters to me. Every draft comes back with some version of this, and every edit pass strips more of it out.
The AI is doing formatting work, not thinking work.
By the time I’m done, the post reads like me because it is me. The structure is mine. The arguments are mine. The language is mine. Most of what the AI produced didn’t make it to the final version. What remains is something I built, pass by pass, out of a rough shape that got me past the blank page.
Where I Draw the Line
I’ve written before about the trap of offloading thinking to AI. The risk is real and I’ve fallen into it myself. The place where I draw the line with writing is the same place I draw it everywhere else: I don’t hand off the thinking.
The ideas, opinions, and stories in these posts are mine. What I’m asking AI to do is take my unstructured thoughts and give me a scaffold I can work from. I’m not asking it to have opinions for me or to figure out what I think. By the time I sit down to write, I already know what I think. I just need help getting past the part where the page is empty.
If I don’t have something to say, I don’t write a post. The notes I feed in aren’t prompts like “write me a blog post about leadership.” They’re the actual substance, my words, my framing, my stories, just in a messy form that isn’t ready for anyone to read yet. The AI is doing formatting work, not thinking work.
Anyone who lets AI do their thinking runs a real risk of owning work with a voice that isn’t truly theirs. It’s similar to just adopting another person or organization’s views wholesale because enough of them are close to your own. Close isn’t yours. There’s a recent study that actually proved this out. After just ten minutes of AI-assisted problem solving, people performed worse and gave up more often when the AI was taken away. The key detail: the damage was concentrated among people who used AI to get answers directly. People who used it as a scaffold didn’t show the same decline.
AI is a genuinely useful tool and I’d encourage anyone to find the places where it helps them. But don’t let it form who you are. Use who you are to form what it produces.