Why I use AI, what I use it for, and why I’m not the least bit embarrassed about it.
Yes.
I use AI.
Quite a bit, actually.
I use it to brainstorm. I use it to organize ideas. I use it as a writing assistant and an editor. I use it to develop book-cover concepts and create images. I use it to argue with myself when I am not sufficiently confused already.
And sometimes I use it to stare at a project I started years ago and ask the question I probably should have asked then:
What the hell was I trying to do here?
That happens more than I would like to admit.
I have written millions of words in my lifetime. I also have hundreds of projects in various states of completion, decomposition, abandonment, resurrection, and occasionally outright denial.
Books.
Short stories.
Essays.
Screenplays.
Research projects.
Spreadsheets.
Ideas that seemed brilliant at two in the morning and somewhat less impressive after breakfast.
Some are finished.
Many are not.
For most of my life, the unfinished ones had a predictable future. They went into a folder. The folder went onto a computer. The computer eventually went to that great recycling bin in the sky, usually after I bought another computer and moved the folder onto it.
And there the project waited.
For me.
Poor thing.
Then Along Came AI
I did not begin using artificial intelligence because I wanted something else to do my thinking.
I already have plenty of things willing to do that for me. Government agencies immediately come to mind.
I started using AI because I realized it could help me do something I have never been particularly good at.
Finish.
That matters to me now.
I have ideas faster than I can develop them. I can write faster than I can edit. I can start three projects while allegedly working on the fourth.
This was somewhat charming when I was thirty.
At seventy, it has become a logistical problem.
There is only so much time.
AI gives some of that time back.
Not by living my life for me.
By helping me sort through the life I have already lived.
What AI Actually Does for Me
Sometimes it is a brainstorming partner.
I throw an idea onto the table. It throws something back. I tell it why that idea is stupid. It tries again.
Occasionally it tells me why my idea is stupid.
Those conversations can be useful.
Sometimes AI is an editor.
I can hand it something I wrote and ask where it drags, where I repeat myself, where the argument weakens, or where a joke that sounded brilliant in my head should probably be taken outside and quietly put down.
Sometimes it helps organize.
That may be its greatest contribution to civilization.
I have decades of writing scattered across files, computers, folders, old manuscripts, new manuscripts, rewritten manuscripts, and manuscripts cleverly titled things like FINAL, FINAL2, FINAL-REALLY, and FINAL-USE-THIS-ONE.
Artificial intelligence did not create that mess.
I did.
AI just has the misfortune of helping me clean it up.
I also use it for images and book-cover concepts. I am a writer. I am not an illustrator. The world has been spared the consequences of me trying to become one.
You are welcome.
But Does AI Write for Me?
Sometimes it helps write.
There. I said it.
I am not interested in playing the little word game where someone says AI only “assists” while the machine is sitting there generating three paragraphs.
Sometimes I ask it to draft something.
Sometimes I keep part of that draft.
Sometimes I rewrite almost every word.
Sometimes I look at what it produced and wonder whether the machine and I have ever met.
Then we try again.
The important question, at least to me, is not whether AI generated a sentence.
The question is whose work this ultimately is.
Whose idea?
Whose experience?
Whose judgment?
Whose decision?
And who is willing to put his name on it when it is finished?
That would be me.
If the book is good, I will gladly accept your praise.
If it stinks, blaming the computer would be cowardly.
AI Has Never Been Where I Have Been
This is the distinction that matters most to me.
AI did not spend twenty years in the Navy.
It did not wear Chief’s anchors.
It did not serve with Marines.
It has not been married for decades.
It has never watched children grow up or discovered the peculiar magic of becoming a grandfather.
It has never been sick.
It has never been afraid of dying.
It has never sat at a desk with more ideas than time and wondered which ones might still make it out alive.
I have.
Those things matter.
The machine can help arrange the words.
It cannot supply the life behind them.
And if I ever let it do that, then I have stopped writing and started manufacturing.
I have no interest in doing that.
Teaching the Tool
There is another part of this that gets overlooked.
Using AI well takes work.
I have spent a lot of time learning how to use it.
More important, I have spent a lot of time teaching the tools I use how I work.
How I write.
How I think.
What makes me laugh.
What annoys me.
What sounds like me.
And what most definitely does not.
That last category is fairly large.
AI has a natural tendency to make everything sound polished, inspirational, cooperative, and ready for a corporate retreat.
I do not.
So we negotiate.
I tell it when the writing sounds fake. When the joke is too obvious. When the sentence is trying too hard. When it has turned something I actually feel into something that belongs on a coffee mug.
And over time, the process gets better.
So do I.
That may be the part I enjoy most.
The machine is learning how to help me write.
I am learning how to explain what good writing means to me.
That is a useful conversation.
Even when one of us is an appliance.
A Partner, Not a Replacement
I think of AI as a partner.
That word will bother some people.
Fair enough.
I do not mean partner in the human sense. I am not inviting it to Thanksgiving dinner. My wife would object, and I am fairly certain the grandkids would make it sit at the little table.
I mean a working partner.
A tool that talks back.
An editor that never gets tired.
A brainstorming assistant willing to follow me down a rabbit hole at three in the morning and, unlike most sensible people, does not eventually say, “Dave, I’m going to bed.”
That has value.
Especially to someone like me.
Because I know myself.
Without something helping me organize all of this, many of those millions of words would remain exactly where they have been for years.
Almost finished.
Someday.
One of these days.
When I get around to it.
AI gives some of them a chance.
The Final Decision Is Still Mine
There is a line I do not want crossed.
The work still has to belong to me.
I decide what I believe.
I decide what stays.
I decide what gets cut.
I decide when something does not sound right even if I cannot immediately explain why.
And I decide what gets published under the name C. David Moreland.
That responsibility cannot be outsourced.
Neither can judgment.
AI can make a confident mistake. It can misunderstand. It can invent. It can write a perfectly grammatical paragraph that says absolutely nothing.
Humans have been doing that for centuries, of course.
We call some of them congressional reports.
Still, the responsibility is mine.
Use the tool.
Check the tool.
Argue with the tool.
And never surrender your judgment to the tool.
That seems like a reasonable arrangement.
I’m Glad I Found It
I am glad AI came along when it did.
I wish I had it thirty years ago.
Then again, thirty years ago I probably would have used the extra time to start another four hundred projects, so maybe things worked out for the best.
What matters now is that I have work I want to finish.
Stories I want to tell.
Books sitting half alive in old folders.
Thoughts I want to get out of my head before they disappear.
And time is no longer something I can pretend is unlimited.
AI does not change that.
It just gives me a fighting chance to get a little more done with the time I have.
That is why I use it.
Not to replace my voice.
Not to replace my experience.
Not to replace the work.
To help me finish it.
So yes, I use AI.
I use it proudly, carefully, skeptically, and sometimes badly.
I am still learning.
So is the technology.
And somewhere in that strange partnership, a few projects that might have died quietly on an old hard drive are finally getting a chance to live.
I like that.
Besides, I have always said never ignore a good rabbit hole.
AI just helps me get back out of a few of them.
The Chief