There is a curious accusation doing the rounds at the moment, one that arrives quickly and with a certain confidence.
‘That’s been written by AI’.
It is often said as a dismissal, a quiet undermining, sometimes even a veiled insult.
The irony (a further irony is that AI doesn’t ‘do’ irony) of course, is that ,much more often than not, the accusation isn’t true.
I write for a living.
It is what I do, how I think, how I make sense of the world.
And yes, breaking news, I use AI as part of my work.
Just I might use a cup of coffee, my digital voice recorder or my laptop.
As a tool.
In the same way an electrician does with a voltage tester or multimeter; the surgeon his or her scalpel or imaging technology and a paramedic their defibrillator.
AI?
I would be foolish not to.
But let’s be clear about what that actually means, because the phrase ‘…written by AI’ has become a blunt instrument, swung about with very little understanding of what sits behind it.
So yes, for me, AI is a tool. A remarkably powerful one, but a tool, nonetheless.
I use it to gather information at speed, to test an idea, to explore angles I may not have considered, to sense-check facts, to open doors rather than walk through them. It can surface sources, point me towards further reading, highlight patterns and contradictions, and do in seconds what might once have taken hours.
That matters, particularly for clients. It saves time, and time, as we all know, is money.
But the writing itself? That is mine. Always has been. Always will be.
Because writing is not simply the arrangement of words on a page.
It is judgement. It is instinct. It is tone, rhythm, restraint, emphasis.
It is knowing when to hold something back and when to let it land. It is memory, experience, personality, bias even. It is the quiet accumulation of years spent listening, observing, living. No machine can replicate that. Not truly.
So what is AI, really?
At its simplest, it is an extraordinarily fast reader. It draws on vast amounts of information across the web, from articles, books, research papers, public data, and more. It identifies patterns, connections, probabilities. It can then present that information in a coherent way, often with pointers towards where that information came from, allowing you to go deeper if you wish. It does not ‘think’ as we do, nor does it feel, reflect, or understand in any human sense.
It processes and predicts.
And in doing so, it gives us something valuable. Not answers, but starting points.
We have been here before, though we seem to have forgotten it. Every generation believes it is facing something entirely new, something that will change everything, something to be feared or resisted.
Because when we find the time to slow down and allow ourselves to breathe….
…and go with me on this one.
AI has always been with us.
Picture it. A group gathered around a fire. Night pressing in. One voice begins.
That storyteller is not creating from nothing. He or she is drawing on everything they have seen, heard, remembered. Stories passed down from others. Local myths. Fragments of truth. Embellishments added over time. Lessons learned from experience. The storyteller gathers all of that material, filters it, reshapes it, and delivers it in a way that fits the moment and the audience.
In that sense, it is a kind of living database.
Not cold or mechanical, of course, but still a system of gathering, processing, and presenting information. The teller selects what matters, emphasises certain parts, leaves others out, adapts the story depending on who is listening. A group of children might hear something wondrous and reassuring. A group of hunters might hear something sharper, more cautionary.
The same raw material, reassembled in different ways.
Sound familiar?
“That was written by AI” is the “Oh, I’ve heard that one before” of the 2020’s.
It doesn’t stop there.
When radio arrived, it was extraordinary. Voices, music, news, travelling invisibly through the air into people’s homes. It changed how we consumed information and entertainment almost overnight.
Some saw it as a threat to conversation, to community, even to thought itself.
Sound familiar?
Then came television. Moving images, stories unfolding in front of us. Again, the same concerns. Passive consumption.
The death of imagination. The erosion of reading.
Sound familiar?
And books? Even they were once considered disruptive. The printing press allowed knowledge to spread far beyond those who could afford hand-copied manuscripts.
It democratised information. It unsettled those who had controlled it.
Sound familiar?
Each of these innovations, in their own time, could have been described as a kind of artificial intelligence. Not in the technical sense we use today, but in the broader sense of extending human capability. They gathered information, shaped it, and delivered it to us in new and powerful ways.
Did they replace human thought, creativity, or storytelling? Of course not. They changed the landscape, certainly. They made some things easier, some things faster. But the essence of what it means to create, to communicate, to tell a story, remained firmly human.
AI is no different.
The danger is not the tool itself, but how we choose to use it. If someone allows it to do all the thinking, all the shaping, all the writing, then yes, something is lost. The voice flattens. The nuance disappears. It becomes competent, perhaps, but rarely compelling.
But used well, used carefully, used honestly, it becomes an ally. It clears the undergrowth so that you can see the path more clearly. It frees up time to think, to refine, to craft. It supports the work without replacing the worker.
So when I hear that phrase, ‘….oh, that was written by AI’, I find myself smiling slightly. Not dismissively, but knowingly.
Because behind every piece of writing worth reading, there is still a person. Someone who has chosen the words, shaped the sentences, felt the rhythm of it, decided what matters and what does not. Someone who has, in the end, taken responsibility for the story being told.
And that, whatever tools we use along the way, is something no machine can claim.
Or ever will.
