I am, as my friend T calls me, a geriatric millennial, a cusper who has written with a manual typewriter, an electric typewriter, a transparent, candy-colored, giant computer, and now a laptop that magically connects with every other screen in my life. What a time to be alive! Earlier this week, one of my very sexy writerly tasks was to lift text from an Instagram post onto a Google document. My elderly brain—still somehow harboring the traumas that came with old school technology—panicked, before realizing it’s now possible to copy text from an image using a phone camera. It was the bare minimum of what technology has afforded professional writers of late, but in that moment, I embraced it, the same technology that I find myself at odds with every day as a writer who has to write using AI.
Artificial Intelligence Is… King?
Did you know that as of 2025, around 78 percent of companies worldwide have adopted AI technologies and 99 percent of Fortune 500 companies use it for various business functions? This tells us two things: First, that anyone not using AI as a professional is already lagging behind in some respect, and second, that AI will soon be inescapably integrated in business and everyday life. AI tools are widely used in publishing companies to support editorial workflow tasks like brainstorming, content planning, drafting, editing, and research. Those that are more competitive also use it for metadata optimization and boosting engagement.
In the best of these places, usage is regulated, contained, and constantly evaluated to produce content that “still sounds human.” Funnily enough, one side effect of training AI on Large Language Models (LLMs) and Natural Language Processing (NLP) to generate human-like text is that text ends up sounding, well, very AI. Both models rely heavily on identifying patterns in data, such as grammatical structures, word associations, and context clues, to generate human-sounding content. Naturally, patterns, when regurgitated, become predictable, manifesting “tell-tale signs” of AI use.
One hot debate on the internet is whether the presence of em dashes and Oxford commas is one of these tell-tale signs. As a writer who learned how to write by reading classic and contemporary literature, I take offense (an understatement). I use em dashes for the satisfaction of seamlessly inserting emotional asides, and the Oxford comma out of love for order and clarity. But while these assumptions hurt my fragile writerly ego, they’re not entirely untrue. Many AI-generated articles do contain an overwhelming amount of em dashes, most of which are misplaced and misused. So now I find myself avoiding the em dash when I write as myself, and weeding them out of my AI-assisted stories from fear of being found out—yes, I use AI. In fact, I am paid to master it, but no amount of money can ease the burden of AI guilt and buy the pride and peace of mind that comes with writing raw.
It came to a point when I couldn’t remember what my real voice sounds like. “I used to be funny. Am I still funny?”
Reframing the AI Narrative
The first thing any self-respecting writer would ask is, “Is this plagiarism?”
Although I don’t have to pretend that I don’t use AI, the fear and guilt are still very real, and they show up as overcompensating. I overdo fact-checking to the point of confusion. I obsess over making the AI-generated article “my own” by changing the introduction or adding insights here and there. I remove all of the so-called signs of AI writing, like alliteration, contrastive framing, and overly inspirational, TED-talk-ish writing. But even after purging my article, the guilt persists. And even with human intervention, my articles still feel soulless and disconnected, at least to me.
It came to a point when I couldn’t remember what my real voice sounds like. “I used to be funny. Am I still funny?” Occasionally, I would accept more challenging writing assignments just to test if I’m still a writer. Sure, artificial intelligence makes me more efficient. Harder, better, faster, stronger, as the song goes. Because of this, AI doesn’t make me feel replaceable or threatened like most people fear—with it, I feel like an unstoppable machine. But it does eat away at the soul and the guilt is not so easy to brush off.
One way of coping is by seeing it as a new craft rather than a betrayal of the old. At this rate of AI adoption in companies, being able to use AI is poised to become an essential skill, and those who embrace it will have more opportunities in the long run. Am I gaslighting myself? Perhaps. But is this also the truth? Absolutely. The idea that two opposing ideas can exist at once gives me hope. I am, after all, a writer who creates from nothing, existing in a world where originality and authenticity are becoming increasingly scarce or, worse, manufactured.
Maybe the guilt comes from feeling somewhat complicit in changing the writing landscape as we know it, but here’s the thing: It’s going to change anyway. The best a writer can do is adapt if they want to, or don’t if they don’t. There’s space for more than one kind of us in this industry, and there’s room for any work that’s done with integrity and good intentions—with AI assistance or without.
ILLUSTRATION BY ELEANOR BAUTISTA.
