The Ghost in My Thesaurus

I want to get something off my chest, and I want to do it before somebody else does it for me in a comments section, badly, with the word “lazy” spelt wrong.

I use AI. In my writing. Regularly. There. Feels a bit like standing up at a meeting I didn’t know I’d joined, but here we are.

I’ve been turning sentences into money, one way or another, since before some of the people currently howling about “AI slop” were born. I’ve sat in libraries for entire wet Yorkshire afternoons, chasing down a single fact through three cross-referenced indexes because the internet, as a concept, hadn’t been invented yet. I’ve worn out a thesaurus looking for a word that meant “angry” but didn’t sound like I was twelve. I’ve rung newspaper archives and waited days for a fax. Actual paper, actual fax machine, actual waiting. Ask a twenty-five-year-old what that sentence means and watch their face do something interesting.

Nobody ever accused me of cheating for any of that. Using reference tools to write better and faster wasn’t fraud; it was called being professional. So somebody’s going to have to explain to me, slowly, with small words, why the exact same instinct… find the right information, find the right phrase, get the job done properly… suddenly became a moral failing the moment it got faster and better at its job.

The Google Bit Nobody Wants to Talk About

Here’s the part that really tickles me, and it’s the bit I think the outraged brigade conveniently skip past. For the last few years, before you even get to click a single link on Google, you’ve been served an AI-generated summary at the top of the page. Millions of people, daily, are getting their “research” done by an algorithm that reads the internet for them and hands them a tidy paragraph. Nobody wrote a furious blog post about that. Nobody’s cancelling Google. It just quietly became the water we swim in.

So when I sit down to write and use a tool that does, more transparently and more accountably, exactly what Google’s been doing to the entire planet in the background for years… the outrage feels less like principle and more like people being cross that I told them. I didn’t sneak it past you wrapped in a search bar. I just said it out loud, which, in hindsight, might have been my actual crime. Honesty as the scandal. Marvellous.

On Pictures, and the Death of the Stock Photo Lie

I used to buy stock photos. You know the ones. A suspiciously delighted woman eating a suspiciously green salad at a laptop that isn’t plugged into anything. Every single one of them is a small, agreed-upon lie between me and the reader: this image has nothing to do with anything, but it fills the space nicely, doesn’t it?

Now I generate an image that actually matches the piece I’ve written. Actually reflects the mood, the metaphor, the cave-dwelling nonsense I get up to out here in rural Spain with a small, feral collective of friends who think I’m mad for doing any of this at all. Somehow that’s the bit people find sinister. Not the decade of recycled stock photography deceiving everyone equally and boringly. The bit where the image is finally, for once, honest about what it’s illustrating.

What This Isn’t

I’m not handing over the writing. Let’s be clear, because somebody will try to flatten this into “man admits robot writes his newsletter”, and I’d rather strangle that headline in its crib. The voice is mine. The sarcasm, unfortunately for everyone involved, is mine. The judgement about what’s worth saying, what’s worth cutting, what’s a genuinely interesting angle versus what’s just noise dressed up as insight… that’s still sat right here, in this cave, being done by me, with a coffee that’s gone cold because I got distracted arguing with a sentence.

What’s changed is the same thing that’s always changed for writers who didn’t fossilise on purpose. The tools got faster. The research got deeper in less time. The pictures got relevant instead of generically pleasant. That’s not a betrayal of craft. That’s just what tools have always done, since somebody first decided a sharpened stick was better than a blunt one.

The Real Question, Which Nobody’s Actually Asking

The people getting genuinely upset about writers using AI rarely seem to ask the question that actually matters, which is: did the result get better, or did it get lazier? That’s it. That’s the whole test. Not “did a machine touch it,” because a machine touched your encyclopaedia, your typewriter ribbon, your spellchecker, your Google search, your bloody printing press. The question was always quality and honesty, and it still is.

What actually offends people, I suspect, isn’t the tool. It’s writers who used it to hide the join, who let a machine do the thinking and then took the byline like they’d bled for it. That’s a real sin. I’d happily join the pitchfork queue for that one. But that’s not what’s happening here, and pretending it is is just easier than sitting with the discomfort of watching an old craft change shape in real time.

I’m sixty-six years old, living off-grid on a Spanish hillside because I got tired of pretending modern life made sense to me. I’ve watched entire industries reinvent themselves out of necessity and vanity in equal measure. I’ve watched better men than me refuse to adapt out of pure stubborn pride, and I’ve watched them become footnotes for it. I don’t fancy being a footnote. I fancy being read.

So yes. I use AI to research faster than I ever could alone. I use it to find a phrase I’m circling but can’t quite land. I use it to build images that actually belong to the piece instead of lying next to it. And I’ll keep doing it, loudly, while the same people quietly do the same thing and call it “editorial support” in their masthead credits.

Am I bad? Genuinely don’t know. Ask me again once I’ve worked out whether anyone who says no is telling the truth, or just hasn’t admitted it yet either.

Until Next Time

The Singularity Dominus lol