I use generative AI extensively in my work – for research, thinking, organizing sprawling ideas, asking questions, finding patterns, and helping me shape language.

I was a writer long before AI. What surprised me about working with it is that my writing has become more distinctly my own, not less.

AI gives me a way to work conversationally with my neurodivergent thoughts. There’s a lot going on in this brain, and it helps me sort through the cacophony in a way that lets me express myself more fully, completely and confidently – with considerably less stress and self-flagellation.

That doesn’t mean I assume something is true because an AI said it. I’ve learned firsthand how easily AI can be confidently wrong, overly agreeable, or create coherence where there really isn’t any. I’ve even watched ideas suggested by AI become repeated often enough that they began to look like established facts about me and my own work. I’ve come to think of those as fossils.

So I pay attention to provenance. I try to distinguish between what I experienced, thought, wrote or knew; what AI helped me articulate; and what AI introduced into the conversation in the first place. I don’t always get that perfectly right, but the distinction is worth paying attention to.

My writing has always been influenced by things outside of me – anthropology books, conversations, teachers, experiences, other writers and editors, spiritual traditions, and people I’ve worked with. Nobody expects a writer to disclose every conversation that helped her finally understand something. Authorship has never meant that every constituent thought arose spontaneously inside an uncontaminated individual mind.

I recognize that AI complicates that. It can participate much more directly in both language generation and intellectual synthesis, and its contributions can become difficult to distinguish from my own over hundreds of conversations. That’s precisely what I’ve noticed.

I don’t claim sole origination of every idea or every turn of phrase you find here. I do claim authorship and editorial responsibility for the work I publish under my name. AI sometimes helps me see connections or possibilities I hadn’t seen on my own, and it sometimes helps shape the words you read here. I decide what stays, what goes, what sounds like me, what I believe, and what I’m willing to put my name on.

And that is precisely why I wanted to leave this note here for you to find, if knowing how the work was made is something you care about.

A note about AI