AI & me

As I resume my writing in the age of AI, I can’t help but wonder, with every post: Will my readers think this was written by me, or by AI? And so, I want to say something about my relationship with AI.

AI is helping me in some very real ways as I navigate my autistic burnout. When I have unfamiliar experiences and have specific questions about the neurodivergent nervous system, it helps me to understand things that then in turn how to deal with it. I am now taking its help in coming up with an Ayurvedic-principles based menu for my kitchen. And a few practical things like that, that needs pulling out stuff from different sources and compiling them for my easy understanding or use.

But I do not want AI to do my writing of any kind. Here’s why!

What I am offering to the world is not merely words strung together. It is my creativity. My stream of consciousness. Words are merely a channel, a medium, a vehicle for the prāṇa that flows through me to be offered to the collective consciousness. This is what I have always tried to and will continue to aspire to offer through my writing, to reach the heart of the reader. And AI can never be the medium for that!  

Having said that, beginning with my previous post, I have asked ChatGPT to help me with something very limited: correcting spelling errors and obvious grammatical errors. I am not asking it to add ideas, rewrite my thoughts, embellish my language, or remove my words. You could perhaps call it my 5% rule.

The words, ideas, images, metaphors, insights, creative expression and sentence structure all remain mine. AI is simply helping me with some of the cleaning up, which I need help with especially with my limited cognitive capacity. Otherwise, like my hundreds of pages of unpublished manuscripts that I wanted to edit and refine once before posting, what I write might be sleeping in my files.  

The same goes for the images I use. Those that I have used so far, and those I intend to use, will either be photographs taken by me or my own artwork. Will specify source, if for some reason I need to take it from the net. 

Having clarified this bit, I’ll get back to my series on what is now around autistic burnout, but might branch out into other interests of mine.