The tool can't fake the 20 years
On LinkedIn I admitted the obvious. Yes, a tool helps me write these. You would think, from some of the responses, that I had confessed to a crime.
Let me tell you what actually happens when I “write” a post.
I have the story, because I lived it. I have the numbers, because they are mine. I know what happened in the mechanical room, on the roof, in the deal that went sideways. Then I use a tool to help me get it out of my head and onto the page in a way you will actually read. That is the whole scandal. That is it.
Some corner of the internet has decided this is cheating. I find that hilarious, so let me poke at it for a minute.
I spent 9 years engineering Apple stores in 21 countries. In all that time, not one person ever asked if I forged my own steel. Nobody demanded I mix my own concrete by hand to prove the building was really mine. I used a calculator instead of doing long division on a napkin, and somehow the structures still stand. I used design software instead of a pencil and a straightedge, and the stores still opened. An engineer is a person who picks the right tool for the job and then takes full responsibility for what it builds. That is not cheating. That is the entire profession.
Writing is the only place people still pretend the tool is the enemy. A word processor was a tool. Spellcheck was a tool. The keyboard you are complaining on is a tool. Somewhere a monk is still furious that you are not copying this out by candlelight. The gate always moves. And the people guarding the newest version of it are almost never the people actually building anything.
Here is the line they keep missing, and it is the only line that matters.
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The tool cannot fake the part that is true.
It can help me phrase a sentence. It cannot walk a roof for 20 years. It cannot invent the $3.97M I have actually lent out, or the 400+ buildings I have actually stood inside, or the rats that were very much living under my kitchen floor. Feed a tool a lie and it will happily make the lie sound gorgeous. Feed it my life and all it does is help me say what already happened.
So when someone tells me AI-assisted writing makes the story fake, I hear something else. I hear a person who is more impressed by the sentences than by whatever the sentences are pointing at. That is a strange place to plant a flag. The writing was never the valuable part. The 20 years were.
You can borrow my tool. It is not a secret. You can borrow my sentences too, honestly, take them. What you cannot borrow is the part that took a whole career and a lot of ruined shoes to earn.
Now, this is the spot in an essay where the writer signs his name. Big flourish. A little “see, a real human being, flesh and blood,” just to prove the robot did not do it.
I think you already know whether a person wrote this.
And if a tool helped me say it cleaner, the buildings are still real, the money is still real, and the rats were absolutely real.
The tool can fake the writing. It was never going to fake the 20 years.
Eyes Open,
Jon