Is This Me?

I have always loved tech. The future, the what-ifs, the whole idea that tomorrow might work better than today. Star Trek was one of my go-to's growing up. And more than the phasers or the warp drive, the thing that stuck with me was small and quiet: a person would just talk to the computer, tell it what they needed, and it would go do it.

I used to dream about that. Just tell the machine, and the machine handles it.

Well, it's here. Sort of. We walk around with pocket-sized computers now, communicators straight out of Star Trek. More powerful than anything I imagined at twelve. The other stuff, the talking-to-the-computer-and-it-does-the-thing piece, that's here too, sort of. It stumbles. It isn't perfect, and it won't make you a carrot cake.

The thing people are half-afraid of, though, the runaway intelligence, the sentient machine, not really. Not yet. But the seed of it is here.

I recently saw a news story on YouTube. Anthropic, one of the AI companies, is going to start watermarking text that its AI generates. Around the same time I read about a professor who'd rigged up some way to tell whether his students were using AI on their exams.

And it got me thinking, because I have a horse in this race. So let me just tell you what I actually do. Not to defend it, not to argue about it. Just so you know, and you can make of it whatever you want.

Shhh… I use AI.

It started years ago with Grammarly. Business emails, mostly. It cleaned up my commas and caught the dumb stuff. Then slowly it crept into my real writing, the short pieces, the blog posts.

Then AI came along, and I started using ChatGPT, and eventually Claude, to help me write.

Here's how it goes, start to finish.

I get an idea. From something I read, something I heard, or something that slapped me across the face. Then I put fingers to keyboard and I just let it all out, grammar be damned, whatever's in my head onto the screen. Then I paste that into the AI and ask it to help. Clean it up. Do some research if I'm fuzzy on a fact and don't want to get it wrong. And it hands something back.

And then comes the part that's actually the writing.

I go through it paragraph by paragraph, sentence by sentence, and I hunt for anything that feels off. Anything that doesn't sound like me. And there's a lot of it. The AI reaches for phrases I'd never use, crosses t's and dots i's that I wouldn't, gets clever where I'd stay plain. So I cut. I rewrite. I paste my own sentences back in. I tell it, no, that's not me, and we go again. Half of what it gives me ends up on the floor. What's left standing has been through my hands so many times it's mine, whatever a machine touched along the way.

So the pieces you've been reading are AI-aided. Not AI-written. And there's a difference, because there's a part a machine can't do. My memories.

Only I was there. Only I had the FM2 in that hallway in Sacramento at twenty years old. Only I stood next to my father while he had an oven apart, handing him tools, calling it bonding. Only I changed the battery twice for a model I'd never shoot again. Only I have felt the specific weight of over five months without my dad. The machine can shape a sentence. It cannot have lived the life the sentence came out of. And the life is the only part that was ever really the writing.

So here's where I leave it. I don't think the answer is mine to give. You decide.

They're building watermarks. They're building detectors. All of it trying to answer one question: did a machine touch this? And maybe that's a fair question. But I keep thinking it might be the wrong one. Because a watermark can tell you a sentence passed through a computer. What a detector can't tell you is whether the writer, human or AI-assisted, meant a single word of it.

This very post went through the process I just described. So as you read it, you might be wondering: is this him, or is this the machine? Which parts are Henri and which parts are the AI?

Good. Wonder that. That's the whole point.

Because if a tool is used well, it disappears into the work, the way a hammer disappears into the house. Nobody stands in a home and credits the hammer. And underneath all the fear about what these machines might become, there's the plain thing it was built to do in the first place, the Star Trek thing: help a person think. Work through an idea. Declutter a crowded mind so the person can find what they actually meant to say.

That's what it does for me. The ideas are mine. The memories are mine. The life is mine.
The rest is just a very good hammer.

What that's worth, you decide.