Stop Letting ChatGPT Write Your Thoughts (An Authenticity Rant)
Okay, rant time. I'm seeing way too many people outsourcing their thinking to AI, and it's honestly depressing. Like, I get it - ChatGPT can write a decent email, summarize stuff, whatever. But when you start using it to write your actual thoughts? That's where I draw the line.
Here's the thing: AI can produce grammatically perfect, logically structured text. It can mimic styles, follow patterns, hit all the right SEO keywords. But it can't replicate YOUR lived experience, YOUR specific insights, YOUR weird way of connecting random ideas.
The whole point of writing isn't just to produce text - it's to think through problems. When you're struggling to find the right words, restructuring sentences, deleting and rewriting paragraphs, you're literally building your understanding of the topic. You're creating your own mental model.
Skip that process and you get:
- Generic, interchangeable content that sounds like everyone else
- No personal growth or deeper understanding
- Zero authentic voice or perspective
- Content that feels hollow because it IS hollow
I've been coding for years, and the best technical writing I've read comes from developers sharing their actual struggles, their "aha!" moments, their failures. Not from AI regurgitating documentation.
Your messy first draft where you're trying to explain a complex concept? That's gold. Your frustrated rant about a bug that took you 3 days to fix? That's relatable content. Your half-formed thoughts about a new technology? That's authentic perspective.
Look, I'm not anti-AI. I use it for brainstorming, debugging, quick summaries. But when it comes to expressing my actual thoughts and experiences? That's staying human.
And you know what's funny? Even the AI agrees with me on this one. It's not about AI vs. Human - that's a garbage binary. It's about AI in the loop. Let AI barf out that first messy draft while you're on your fourth coffee at 2am. But then you come in with your weird metaphors, your rage-typed opinions, your spelling errors that are actually personality. That's the sauce. That's the good stuff.
⚠️ Hot Take Alert: This is my raw, unfiltered brain dump after 5 years of coding and 3 jobs. Not some random agentic made corporate fluff. I'm probably wrong about half of this, and that's cool. Drop your thoughts in the comments - whether you're here to roast me or high-five. Just keep it real.
But together? That's a dangerous combo. That's cheating-on-the-test-but-ethically. Use AI to beat the blank page, to outline that monster blog you've been dodging for 3 weeks, to generate 30 trash ideas so you can kill 29 and finally love 1. That's the whole point - not automation, augmentation.
Bottom line: Your authentic voice, even if it's imperfect, is infinitely more valuable than polished AI-generated content. Don't let the algorithm speak for you. The world has enough generic content - it needs YOUR perspective.
Rant over. Now go write something real.