Let's start with a calculator. You punch in 847 × 293 and get 248,171. Quick question: who did that math? You, or the calculator?

Now picture a typewriter. You sit down, hammer out a letter, and pull the page out of the roller. Who wrote those words? You, or the typewriter?

Open a Word document. You type out a report and the grammar checker quietly fixes your comma splices and flags a passive sentence. Who authored that document? You, or Microsoft?

Now use ChatGPT to draft a short story. You feed it your idea, your characters, your direction, and out comes a draft. Who created that story? You, or the AI?

People are so consumed with detecting whether AI touched a piece of text that they've lost the plot. If a human initiates the work, the result belongs to that human. Full stop.

The whole debate about AI not being able to hold a copyright is ridiculous on its face. It's always the human who should hold the copyright, because the human is the one responsible. Imagine sending a threatening email to the President and then telling the Secret Service, "Oh, my chatbot wrote that and sent it on its own." Let me know how that defense works out for you. I'll wait.

The reason I actually care about this is that the punchline of all this hand-wringing is, "Don't use AI." That's absurd. It's the same energy as telling early writers not to use typewriters, or telling accountants not to use calculators, or telling everyone in 1995 not to spell-check their documents because it's somehow cheating.

"Any AI Use Means It's All Slop"

Some people take this even further. In their view, if you used AI at all, the entire piece is AI slop. Doesn't matter that you wrote the ideas, the examples, the argument, the voice — one pass through a language model and the whole thing is contaminated.

This is an attitude fueled by fear of a technology people don't understand. The same crowd often argues that because copyrighted works were used to train the AI, the algorithm itself is tainted and shouldn't be used at all.

Okay. If you've never been vaccinated and never had any kind of cancer treatment, I'll take that argument seriously. But if you have, those treatments likely trace back to Henrietta Lacks — the Black woman whose cells were taken and used for research without her knowledge or consent in 1951. Her cells underpin a staggering amount of modern medicine.

So should we reject vaccines as "Vaccine Slop"? Of course not. The method used to create something does not determine the value of the thing itself. The algorithm works or it doesn't. The treatment heals or it doesn't.

Writing is only slop if it's bad. Not because of how it was made.

So Did I Use AI to Write This?

Of course I did. I wrote down hundreds of words first — the ideas, the examples, the argument, the attitude. Then I had AI clean up my half-finished sentences and organize the whole thing into something coherent. Then I told it to cut the fat so the piece moved fast and didn't bore anyone.