I use AI to write.
That sentence is not complicated, but it is easily misunderstood.
It can sound as if, once AI is involved, the writing no longer belongs to me. As if, once a piece has been polished, the story has become fiction. As if, once the sentences look a little better, the person behind them disappears, leaving only a machine speaking in his place.
Writing like that may look refined, like a flawless piece of craft. But the smoother it becomes, the more it carries a slight chill.
I do not quite agree with that.
I do use AI.
It helps me organize sentences, asks about things I have not explained clearly, and connects scattered fragments. Sometimes it adds a few vague literary words, giving something that originally felt like plain water a little warmth.
That is useful to me.
Because I was never especially good at language classes.
When I learned to write essays, I spent a lot of effort memorizing metaphors, rhetoric, and personification. It felt as if a sentence did not deserve to appear on the exam paper unless it was pretty enough. I also read model essay collections. They often contained a very standard kind of emotion: on a rainy day, a mother carries her feverish child to the hospital; at a crossing, an old grandmother needs someone to help her across the road; someone suddenly does a noble thing and immediately understands a truth about life.
I am not saying those things never happen.
But sometimes I felt those experiences were far away from me.
They felt like plots prepared for scores, like moral props placed inside the exam room. You had not experienced them, but you still seemed expected to write as if you had. In the end, what you wrote might be complete, standardized, and very much like an excellent essay, but it did not necessarily resemble yourself.
It did not resemble the me who was trying to speak. It was more like a mask worn for the sake of grades.
AI has no feelings.
But model essays are not always the real self either.
That is one reason I am now willing to use AI.
I am not asking it to invent a prettier life for me. I only want it to help me organize what is already there.
Many of my thoughts begin as fragments.
One sentence.
One idea.
One feeling I am a little embarrassed to say.
One memory that suddenly comes back.
When they land on the page, they often do not look like an article. They look more like quick notes. Sometimes one sentence sits on one line, like an unorganized storage room. They are not necessarily ugly, but they have not become a vessel. They are indeed mine, but they cannot quite stand yet.
AI is more like someone working beside me.
I provide the fragments, and it helps me make those fragments stand up.
It cannot experience my childhood yard for me. It cannot know why a certain night felt uncomfortable. It cannot decide whether I should buy something, and it certainly cannot marry, live, or bear consequences for me.
It can help me analyze spending, stop a moment of impulse, and throw out a few random ideas so I am not carried only by the emotion of the moment.
But it cannot live for me.
Major decisions still have to return to me.
I can let it plan a route, but I cannot let it walk my life for me.
So I have a clear line between polishing and ghostwriting.
If the theme, main meaning, experience, feeling, and judgment come from me, and AI only helps connect, shape, and add a few words so the piece reads less scattered, that is polishing.
If I think nothing, provide nothing, and only give it a title so it can create the experience, emotion, and conclusion from nothing, that is closer to ghostwriting.
The first is repairing a vessel.
The second is placing a fake object on the table.
Of course, I know AI can sometimes write in a very affected way.
Some sentences are too smooth, too much like a generic tenderness. Some metaphors look nice, but they do not cling to my life. It can also shift my meaning, taking a very plain thought and wrapping it as if it were entering a literary contest.
When that happens, I change it.
If it is too affected, I delete it.
If it is close enough, I make small repairs.
If it does not fit, I ask again.
It is not scripture.
It is not a model essay marked full score by a teacher.
It is only a tool. It can also be a second organizer, or an editor. It gives a shape, and I decide whether that shape still resembles me.
I like the phrase “firing fragments into a blue-and-white porcelain vase.”
Because much expression really does feel like firing.
The clay does not come from nowhere.
The fragments are not given to me by AI.
The raw material is my life, my memory, my confusion, my exhaustion, and the feelings that were not beautifully said but truly existed.
It is just that, if I relied only on myself, perhaps it would take ten or twenty years to learn how to fire them into something like a proper vessel.
How to begin, turn, and close.
How to write parting.
How to make a plain sentence less dry.
How to turn a bag of fragments into a vase that can be placed on a desk.
AI lets me touch a little of that process earlier.
It does not make me stop thinking.
On the contrary, it forces me to explain more clearly: what exactly am I trying to say? Did I truly experience this? Does this metaphor cling to me? Is this sentence too false? Is this conclusion one I am willing to admit?
In the past, I might have spent great effort learning rhetoric and still failed to write something real.
Now, I only need to take out the real fragments first.
Metaphor, rhetoric, and personification are things AI can help with a little.
It does not even need to ghostwrite.
Because the most important stroke is not in the sentence.
It is in the experience.
Some articles can be plain.
They can be simple.
They can even be a little funny.
They do not have to become a story where my mother carries feverish me to the hospital in the rain, nor a story about helping an old grandmother across the road. If those things did not happen to me, I do not want to write them as my own experience just to appear noble.
I would rather write the things that have truly passed through my body and my heart.
Even if they are small.
Even if they begin as plain water.
Even if they are not earth-shaking in the end.
As long as they are true, they are worth organizing.
AI can have no feelings.
But I do.
AI can know nothing about my past.
But I do.
AI can make the sentences smoother.
But it cannot replace the person who has experienced, felt, hesitated, and wanted to leave these things behind.
So I use AI.
And I do not avoid admitting that I use AI.
I simply do not want to outsource my thinking to it.
I borrow it to fire fragments into a blue-and-white porcelain vase.
But the clay comes from me.
And in the end, I still have to recognize the heat.
This piece is based on my own thoughts, with AI-assisted polishing and revision.
