I get messages a few times a month from people asking if I use an AI tool to write my posts. The honest answer disappoints them. I don’t use one to write my posts. I use a few to help me think, which is a different thing entirely, and that difference is the whole story everyone is missing right now.
Here is the pressure nobody talks about directly. Once you build any kind of public presence, whether it’s a company, a column, or just a following, the expectation is that you show up constantly. Not when you have something to say. And constantly, I have felt that pull for years, long before AI made it easy to give in to it.
That pull is exactly what created what people are now calling AI slop. Scroll any platform for five minutes, and you will see it. Polished paragraphs that say nothing. Confident opinions with no fingerprints on them. A recent study by Pangram Labs found that over a third of long LinkedIn posts are now fully AI-generated.
Slop was never an AI problem. It was a demand problem. We spent years telling professionals who never wanted to be writers, presenters or social media influencers that being good at the job wasn’t enough anymore. Most people never asked for that job, so when a tool showed up that could do it for them in minutes, of course they took it.
Everyone wants to blame the tool for that.
I don’t.
Let me be clear about something first. I use AI most days, and I am not going to pretend otherwise to sound more authentic. I use it to clean up my writing and tighten my sentence structure, both professionally and personally. There is nothing dishonest about that. A carpenter still gets credit for the cabinet even if he used a better sander.
The clearest example in my life right now is the book I have been writing. Fourteen months in, and I am not even halfway through. AI has helped me draft a few chapters and smooth out the flow between sections. But every idea in those pages is mine, built from 36 years in housing and development expereince and it’s not something a prompt could have generated on its own. AI can help me say it better. It cannot hand me 36 years I did not live.
That is the distinction people keep missing.
I use AI to summarize long reports, verify facts before I put my name next to them, and stress test proposals so I can ask a few harder questions before I sign off on something. That is where the actual leverage is, not in generating a paragraph that sounds like me, but in helping me think faster.
None of that replaces judgment. It sharpens it.
So here is where I land. If someone genuinely built the structure of an article, the argument, the point of view, the conclusion, I don’t care how many tools they used to get the grammar right. What I have a problem with is someone who never had an original thought, ran a prompt, and passed off the output as their perspective. That is a credibility shortcut, and eventually readers notice.
The tool was never the problem. The question has always been whether there is a real person, with real judgment, still doing the thinking behind it.
My position is simple. Use the tool to write faster, not to think less.
Take care,
Shane
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