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A.I. didn’t write any part of this story. A.I. didn’t outline it for me and didn’t catch typos on a first draft, though I don’t have any more of a moral issue with that practice than I do with using spellcheck. (Slate happens to have a terrific copy desk, a perk not available at every media outlet these days.)
There’s still a chance I wouldn’t have written this story without A.I. That’s not because the tech is doing anything a person couldn’t do, but because it has gotten good at removing friction in the spots where there was once just enough of it that I used to make problems for myself.
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I prefer to be skeptical about A.I. because people have already found so many destructive uses for it and I don’t trust Sam Altman or his competitors as far as I can throw them. I’m also aiming to be open-minded these days, because it’s just not true anymore that the tech isn’t impressive. When I talked with the prominent A.I. critic Ed Zitron for Slate in February 2025, I agreed with his view that chatbot apps had generated throngs of users but were still lacking in use cases that would take them from a cool toy to a useful tool for anyone who wasn’t spending hours trying to learn how to become a power user. I now think that view is impossible to hold. Spend a few hours in Claude Code or Codex. Tell it to interview you about what you want and, after about five minutes, spin up a portfolio site based on your answers, and then think about what actual trained developers might be doing with that tool. These things do not have to rewire every element of day-to-day life to be unbelievable.
If you’d have asked me a year ago how I was using A.I. in my writing process, the answer would’ve been “Not at all, and you’re a nerd for asking.” Now the answer is different: I use it most days, although not in the…