Your Writing is GenAI-Assisted, Actually

20 August 2026

Your Writing is GenAI-Assisted, Actually

This is a response piece to an article I read on Substack recently that likened GenAI writing to a brain virus.

Let me preface before I go further two critical points:

1. I do not recall the article’s title nor the author’s name; I have blocked them, and I do not wish that anyone reading my essay here would either list the title/author in the comments, because…

2. As an artist, creative writer, literature scholar, and college writing instructor, it is my policy to refuse GenAI in writing because I do not believe there is any ethical use case for GenAI in either art or writing—especially creative writing—and in a very active effort, it is my goal not to engage with these texts so that I will never amplify their signal.

   1. Aside: Yes, this means I have deleted my social media accounts, limit my Amazon purchases, actively disable AI-overviews in my internet searches, and have opted for Duck-Duck-Go over Google. I also don’t use chatbots. There are many steps to the process of not engaging with GenAI, and I’m working through them actively, over time. Essentially, as the meme is going around Substack lately about how we’d survive if we lost AI today: I wouldn’t notice.

      
      

The piece about GenAI writing being a mind-virus was well-written. It claimed that when we read GenAI writing, we corrupt our brains: we expose ourselves to a type of artificial writing which will then influence the way we write in the future. At various points while reading the first half of this article, I threw my fist in the air, “Hell yeah!” I began to feel that if I knew this author IRL we’d be besties—or at least we’d be in cordial violent agreement on the issue.

And then I came to about halfway through the piece, where the author explained how she wrote that article. She said she used AI to brainstorm, research, note-take, organize, polish and edit the essay.

In the next one-line paragraph she wrote: “I did not us AI to write this article.”

And I was violently ripped out of my engagement with the essay. It was that clichéd record scratch moment. I looked around the room, à la The Office, to see if I was the victim of someone’s gag reel—or if anyone else noticed this insane thing that happened. My eyes darted down below to the next paragraph, searching for the “Just kidding!” or “Gotcha!” I expected should follow, which might explain the logical disconnect. There was none. The author continued to her next point.

If it wasn’t a joke, then why was she being disingenuous? Why say one thing, then immediately contradict herself?

Then it dawned on me: she wasn’t joking or being disingenuous; she believed it was true. Because she drafted the essay herself—the original words on the page, that is—she believed that the piece was 100% human-written. She believed she had “not used AI to write” it.

Suddenly the vastness of the general public’s Dunning-Kruger effect surrounding writing lay itself out before me: many people, including but not limited to pre-AI non-writers, do not know that writing is a five-step process, of which “drafting” is just one step.

The writing process consists (more or less) of these five steps:

1. Research

2. Prewriting

3. Drafting

4. Revision

5. Editing

Some writing instructors collapse steps 1-2 into “Prewriting.” I do not, as I think these are two activities requiring the development of distinct skills (locate sources, read sources critically, then organize ideas, make sense of it all). Some writers add a 6^th step: Publication. That makes sense to me, as it’s taken me years to hone my own publication skills and process. Yes, I publish writing outside of Substack—actually I don’t publish anything of mine that I truly value to Substack at all. Y’all get the rants and scraps. Sorry-not-sorry.

And please do not come at me with the bullshit claim that such knowledge of the writing process is somehow privileged. I teach it in Composition I at a community college, where many of my students pay zilch to attend because of the NM opportunity scholarship. Also, information about the writing process is available for free at many reputable sites online:

Here is The Purdue OWL’s explanation of the steps of the writing process.

Here is MIT’s.

…and if you’re going to write about writing, you might want to do a little bit of research about the writing process first. To overlook it is to do your readership a disservice that perpetuates the Dunning-Kruger effect surrounding writing.

In any case, as you can see, this particular author’s writing process is 100% human at the “drafting” stage. That is 20% of the writing process—or if you’d like to weight the steps by time spent, it might be as much as 30%, especially if the writer spent little to no time in research or prewriting (as frankly I have done in this piece, since I am talking about my bread-and-butter).

Why tf does it matter if the writing was only 30% human?

But hold on a second—I’ll get to that. First, I’ll be candid with y’all. I’m about to take yet another Substack siesta. I’m exhausted of reading articles and notes where authors and note-writers hammer GenAI-refusers for being vocal about GenAI-developed content. That was another one from yesterday. Apparently, people on Facebook saw a GenAI-developed poster for an event and were vocal about not going to events where the flyers were clearly developed with AI—and this note’s author harangued them for being vocal about that decision. Her point was solid, I admit: why punish the event itself, especially when that event was community-based and community-driven? And it was a valuable event. Sure. I see that.

But I also see the other side. GenAI erodes our confidence in our own ideas while simultaneously eroding our critical thinking, this we already know, but it is also deskilling us. You can create a decent-looking flyer in 15-30 minutes via templates in a variety of accessible programs without relying on GenAI. In the past, I’ve developed such flyers in Word, PowerPoint, Google Slides, and the Adobe Creative Cloud, but my preferred is Canva, whose basic program is free and easy to use. Yes; unfortunately, if you’re not particularly GenAI-literate, you could slink into GenAI even in Canva, but because it is so user-friendly, you can get pretty good at creating products yourself really fast. Most of these programs even provide a selection of stock photos that are not GenAI for your perusal and use.

So when I see an AI-generated flyer, it is clear to me the author didn’t commit the 15-30 minutes of effort to bring me to their event. It also presents to me an iceberg effect: if they used AI for their flyer, how much are they relying on it in all other areas of their life—areas I cannot see? It’s a bad look, and its deeply depressing. I may still go to their event if I think the event is worth my time, but my opinion of the author has now been informed. Tainted even, if I’m being fair.

Further as a writing instructor, it is clear to me when an author of a text develops content employing GenAI, they have overlooked the Rhetorical Situation of that text. The Rhetorical Situation includes these five elements:

1. Text

2. Author

3. Audience

4. Purpose

5. Setting

6. Medium (this one I add for my classes, but is not traditionally in the list)

You can learn more about these elements of a Rhetorical Situation at the Purdue OWL’s site here. The idea is thus: for a text to be effectively persuasive, the author must consider all aspects of the Rhetorical Situation to ensure they align with the text’s purpose. Yes, this means they must even evaluate their own credibility as the author of that text for that purpose.

In the case of the aforementioned event flyer, the author had not closely considered their audience, setting, or medium. Would their audience appreciate AI-Generated content? Who was their target audience? If those refusing to attend the event because of the AI-Generated flyer were not the intended audience anyway, then does it really even matter that people were being vocal on Facebook about not going to it? But one must consider the setting and medium, too: the author posted this flyer to Facebook, which is currently a bit rabid with the anti-GenAI sentiment. Did the author consider this? Ultimately, the purpose of drawing people to the event may (or may not!) have been undermined if the author overlooked the Rhetorical Situation—an important aspect of the writing process which occurs during Steps 1 or 1-2: Research and Prewriting.

That lady who wrote the note blaming people for not attending the event based on the AI-Generated flyer? If it’s true that people chose not to attend the event based on the flyer, her blame was misdirected. It is a text’s author who bears responsibility for the effectiveness of said text. “Read the room,” as they say.

Let me repeat that, a little bit louder: a text’s effectiveness is the author’s responsibility. For example, I am well aware that my essay—this essay—will be unpopular with large swaths of people. I am fine with that. I am aiming at those who are not so certain, or who maybe have not yet considered the writing process as a whole.

If your text was AI-Generated and not effective, you cannot blame the audience.

Which brings it all back around: the author is responsible. The author is responsible for all steps of the writing process, and the author is responsible for transparency about those steps with their audience. If the author handed some part of the process off to a bot, the author is responsible for informing the reader that they relinquished control of their content and voice, and they relinquished the responsibility of their writing choices to a tech corporation.

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This is why the use of GenAI to develop texts matters to me.

It matters to me because as an audience member, I am trusting you as an author.

It matters to me because I am an artist, a writer, a literary scholar, and a writing instructor.

It matters to me because I have invested decades of my life to studying and developing my writing craft.

It matters to me because when GenAI is employed in the earlier steps of the writing process, like the research and prewriting stages, it means that the author’s thoughts have been altered, and this means, most-often, that those thoughts were smoothed to be more homogenous. That is to say, they are deprived of their critical humanity and originality.

It matters to me because when GenAI is used in the later steps of the writing process, it steals the author’s voice. I have witnessed this acutely in my students’ writing. Additionally, the author has fed their human-written piece into a GenAI bot for “revision,” which will then contribute to the bot’s data learning. Why would anyone do that?

It matters to me because GenAI is contributing to the cognitive offloading and deskilling of the general public, which is devastating to democracy.

It matters to me because a close friend told me a few days ago how she is using her team to train AI to do their jobs for them—so that the corporation can then lay those employees off.

It matters to me because GenAI has been trained without consent on the work of my all-time favorite authors and artists, as well as my peers.

It matters to me because the tech corps’ decision to scale these models in an effort to get-there-first is devastating our environment and many impoverished neighborhoods where the residents have no voice and no power to protect themselves.

It matters to me because employees training GenAI have had to work under inhumane conditions for inadequate pay.

It matters because I do not want any of my time, energy, writing, art, photography, or money to be used to line the pockets of out-of-touch, power-hungry, progress-for-progress’s-sake-at-any-cost billionaires like Bezos, Zuck, Musk, Altman, Amodei, Huang, etc.

It matters because instead of asking friends, family, or a therapist, my best friend’s first instinct was to ask Claude for guidance when she dealt with a parenting issue with her eldest daughter—an expressly human concern.

It matters to me because I have made an active decision—a political decision—not to engage with GenAI until some regulations are put in place.

It matters to me, perhaps most importantly, because I am a sensitive, and everything about this feels wrong.

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Does this mean writers should not write with GenAI?

My personal take is yes, it means that.

However, I am not representative of any writer’s entire readership. I know this. I know my voice and perspective are in the minority here. And, in fact, I know there are vast readerships who simple do not care if a piece of writing employed GenAI in its development. While I wish this weren’t true, and while I will do everything in my power to alter this, I also accept it.

There is readership for AI-Generated and GenAI-Assisted writing. There probably always will be. So if you want to write, and you wish to employ GenAI at any stage of your writing process—go for it. But because there are readers out here, like me, who have numerous reasons to actively avoid GenAI-assisted texts, it is disingenuous of authors to claim their writing as 100% Human when it is not. And we, the audience, have a right to hold our ground on that point.

Also, why are those employing GenAI to develop text so opposed to labeling their texts as GenAI-Assisted, anyway? Why the insistence on labeling something 100% Human-written when it is not? If you really believe in the value of these products (because they are products, not tools), then why are you averse to sharing your use of them? Something to ponder…

As for the author of the “mind virus” article above, I am grateful that she was candid about how GenAI assisted her for that piece. I wish other “writers” using GenAI in their writing processes were equally as candid. I only wish she’d done the slightest, most basic bit of research about the writing process before writing about it.

The solution may, in part, lie in informing the world about writing fundamentals: writing is a five-step process, and authors are responsible for the rhetorical effectiveness of their texts. Most importantly, if you employ GenAI at any of those steps, your label is technically GenAI-Assisted. You do not get to claim your writing is 100% Human unless it actually is.

Does this make me a “purist”? Or a “luddite”? Does it mean those unbothered by the development and consumption GenAI-powered texts might sneer down their noses at me? Maybe. But I’m kinda done with the name-calling.

Reading and writing are my expertise and my livelihood.

Purist or Luddite or whatever, what this stance makes me is a human artist and writer and literary scholar and writing instructor who respects the whole (human) writing process.