Yeah, I heard it again today. Some comment thread in the cyber-bordello of LinkedIn, that digital hellscape where dreams go to network and souls go to die. I scrolled like a man watching a train derail in slow motion. Each post, a shrieking confessional of career desperation, each reply a hall of mirrors reflecting the same wet-eyed plea: Please, someone validate my professional existence.
And then it hits. The accusation. The scarlet letter of our time: “You used AI.”
Not as a question. Not as an observation. As an indictment. A moral declaration from the Church of Artificial Purity.
I’ve been writing for forty years. That’s forty years of bleeding words through caffeine, nicotine, and deadline-induced dementia. I’ve written in tents, bars, boats, and boardrooms. I’ve written for people who paid me and people who never will. But now, apparently, I’m a heretic because I let a machine help me rearrange commas and maybe whisper a synonym or two into my ear.
It isn’t the criticism that stinks. It’s the smug rot of moral performance. The self-anointed purity police of the digital age who think yelling “AI!” is the new way to end a debate. Like kids on the playground shouting “Your mom!” when they’ve got nothing left in the chamber. They’re not arguing. They’re exorcising.
We’ve traded genuine thought for tribal purity, replacing reason with righteous algorithms. It’s no longer about meaningful discourse, it’s become a damn purity test for the Church of Human Exceptionalism. You can almost hear them clutching their artisanal, hand-rolled opinions as they pray to Saint Authenticity to keep their feeds spotless.
Meanwhile, I’m here talking to the ghosts in my typewriter, sipping from a bottle of brown regret, and trying to remember when people wrote to think instead of to posture. Social fragmentation has pulled up a chair beside me again, grinning like an old cellmate with bourbon breath. “Miss me?” it asks. “We never stopped drinking,” I tell it.
Go ahead. Accuse me. Tell me the words you’re reading aren’t “real” because some silicon assistant sat in the passenger seat. But don’t pretend your thoughts are any less processed. You’ve been trained by hashtags, herded by trends, and branded by engagement metrics. You are a walking algorithm with opinions pre-sorted by your social feed.
AI didn’t kill writing. Narcissism did.
Now pour another drink. The machines are learning, the humans are posturing, and I’m just here trying to remember what it felt like when words still had blood in them.
Bite me.
My disclosure on how I use AI as if that even matters.
About the Author
