When you write something real.
Something that bleeds a little, something that costs you something to put on the page.
Remember this…
…you’re performing a quiet act of immortality.
Every sentence you craft carries a fragment of who you are. Your particular way of seeing the world, your specific blend of humour and pain, your unique voice that sounds like no one else who has ever lived or ever will live.
When someone reads your work years from now, maybe decades after you’re gone, you need to think of it this way.
They may be reading your work to consume some information or a great story. They’re also communing with your ghost (In a non horror way, or in my case, definitely a horror way, cause I’m planning on haunting everyone of you when I’m gone)
That’s the magic of authentic creation.
It’s why we still feel the presence of writers who died centuries ago when we read their words. It’s why a perfectly crafted sentence can make you feel less alone in the universe, like someone else has been exactly where you are and found a way to articulate what you couldn’t.
Your words become part of other people’s internal landscape. They get woven into the fabric of how readers think, how they see the world, how they understand themselves. A phrase you wrote during a moment of clarity becomes the thing someone else remembers during their darkest hour. Your perspective becomes part of their perspective. You live on through the neural pathways you’ve helped create in minds you’ll never meet.
This is why AI is such a fucking tragedy.
A Grade-A Shakespearean tragedy, although Shakespeare is cool and AI is not cool, duh.
When you let artificial intelligence write for you, not only are you lazy. The theft is almost existential. You’re stealing from your own legacy, robbing the future of whatever unique contribution you might have made to the great human conversation.
And with the way the world is going right now, fuck me. There’s not really that much human conversation left at the moment.
AI can generate technically proficient prose. It can mimic styles, follow formulas, hit all the right notes. But it can’t bleed. It can’t ache. It can’t surprise itself with an unexpected insight that emerges from the collision of personal experience and raw honesty.
When you publish AI generated content under your name, you’re essentially catfishing the future. You’re putting your face on someone else’s thoughts, except there is no someone else, just a statistical prediction engine that has learned to simulate human expression without ever having experienced human existence.
The words don’t carry you forward because they were never yours to begin with. They’re dead echoes, flat ripples in the pond of human consciousness. They might sound like you, but they don’t contain you. There’s no soul fingerprint embedded in the syntax, no DNA of your particular way of being human.
And here’s what really pisses me off about this AI epidemic…
It’s not just about individual writers selling out their own authenticity. I mean collectively if everyone keeps going the way they are it’s going to lead to a collective impoverishment of human connection.
Every piece of AI generated content is a missed opportunity for genuine human connection. Every algo-jizz blog post is a slot that could have been filled with someone’s actual thoughts, actual struggles, actual insights born from the messy process of being alive.
We’re flooding the information ecosystem with soulless content that looks human but isn’t, and in the process, we’re making it harder for real human voices to cut through the noise. We’re teaching algorithms to mimic us so well that we’re becoming indistinguishable from our own simulations.
This is why you need to write your own shit. Not because it’s more ethical or more professional, but because it’s the only way to ensure that some part of you survives your own death.
Write like your life depends on it, because in a very real sense, your afterlife does. Pour yourself onto the page without reservation. Let your personality saturate every paragraph. Be so unabashedly yourself that your voice is unmistakable, irreplaceable, impossible to simulate.
The world just need more YOU.
When you die, your body will decompose. But your words, if they’re really yours, will keep infecting minds, shaping thoughts, offering comfort, provoking insights, making people laugh or cry or think differently about their own lives.
And while I’m tooting on about all of this word stuff.
Don’t forget to go grab this gem.
Stephen Walker.