The AI red line I refuse to cross: Authentic authorship isn’t negotiable

I’ll get right to the point. If you’re reading this blog post, I wrote it. The next one? I’ll write that too. And every one after that. Always.

What am I on a rant about today?

It’s my bright red line about AI, which I developed several years ago. It has not wavered and never will.

I will never put out content under my name — byline if you want to get fancy about it — that was developed by an AI agent.

This is relevant as I’ve noticed more than a few content creators share statements like this about AI:

I’ve trained an AI agent to write as me. I uploaded all my previous content and now have an agent that can post from me on a regular basis. I feed my agent a topic and it does the rest. Fresh content from me.

I’ve got a few problems with this approach.

First, an AI agent is not you; it’s imitating you. Now, maybe it’s producing a very good imitation of you, but let me say again for the record, it’s not YOU.

Claiming a bot can crank out your thoughts sells you short. The years you’ve spent developing expertise and lived experience can’t be replicated by a system trained to imitate you. And for your audience, imitation content isn’t neutral. It signals a lack of respect.

I’m sure that some of the most fervent AI content creators might argue that in the end it doesn’t matter. They believe their audience only cares about the topic and the fact that content was produced.

That may be true for generic, transactional content. But most people don’t read blogs, watch videos, or listen to podcasts primarily for the topic alone. You engage because you care what the actual human being thinks about a topic. Their feelings. Their passion. Their insights. That’s probably 75% of the value. Maybe more.

Content creators should care about delivering value to their audience. Short-changing them through automation and AI agents is an approach simply not worth taking. It cheats you and them.

Another problem with AI outsourcing

For me, writing stimulates thinking. Most people learn by reading, writing and thinking.

However, today you can create something or get information on any topic in a minute that might have taken you an hour — or even days, weeks, months or years — of concentration and thinking in the past.

That’s hard work, but deep study processes have value.

Getting an answer is not the same thing as acquiring real knowledge, learned through study over time. That’s a debate we’re seeing play out right now in the education field.

This is from a recent study published by NPR:

The report describes a kind of doom loop of AI dependence, where students increasingly off-load their own thinking onto the technology, leading to the kind of cognitive decline or atrophy more commonly associated with aging brains.

Rebecca Winthrop, one of the report's authors and a senior fellow at Brookings, warns, "When kids use generative AI that tells them what the answer is … they are not thinking for themselves. They're not learning to parse truth from fiction. They're not learning to understand what makes a good argument. They're not learning about different perspectives in the world because they're actually not engaging in the material."

Cognitive off-loading isn't new. The report points out that keyboards and computers reduced the need for handwriting, and calculators automated basic math. But AI has "turbocharged" this kind of off-loading, especially in schools where learning can feel transactional.

As one student told the researchers, "It's easy. You don't need to (use) your brain."

That’s sobering. And I fear many adults are falling into the same trap.

When AI works well

At this point, you might think I’m anti‑AI. I’m not. In fact, I use AI for certain writing and content producing tasks at work almost every day. And for my personal writing, I’ll use AI to analyze and tighten up my original content — including this blog post — after I’ve spent time with it on my own.

In the same study quoted above, many teachers talk about how AI can help with the writing process for some kids.

Teachers report that AI can 'spark creativity' and help students overcome writer's block. … At the drafting stage, it can help with organization, coherence, syntax, semantics, and grammar. At the revision stage, AI can support the editing and rewriting of ideas as well as help with … punctuation, capitalization, and grammar."

That’s positive, but again, the process of thinking through a topic, exploring it and drawing conclusions, is essential to the outcome.

Final thoughts (for now)

I recently spoke with a graduate class about how the job of professional creators is changing in an era of AI content. One of the students was concerned about the quality and accuracy of AI writing. And they were worried about how using the tools might erode their worth as an employee.

My advice was two-fold. It’s important to understand what AI tools can do for you. Understand that and embrace it. On the other hand, create a red line for what you don’t want AI to take away from your role.

My red line is simple: The writing you get under my name will always be from me. Authentic authorship isn’t negotiable.