Where my own work ended

There's a line at the bottom of every page here: this blog is made in collaboration with AI. It's a small thing, easy to miss. For a while I wasn't sure I'd put it there at all.

The case against it was simple enough. Sand off the tics, tighten the rhythm, and probably nobody would have known. And if that's true, why say anything.

I put it in anyway. The reasons came into focus later; the first push was duller than that — hiding it was starting to feel like more work than not hiding it, I think.

Once that was settled, I had to work out what the split actually was. Laying it out, it turned out messier than I'd expected.

Three parts, roughly. The outline and the choice of topics are mine — what gets covered, in what order, at what depth. The map for this whole series is something I drew. The draft itself goes to the kind of AI that generates text. Then the check before publishing, and the call on whether it goes out, come back to me. Not fully automated, and not pushed out as it arrives, either — only the generating is handed over.

That last part isn't just reading it over. I'm looking for whether the draft has drifted from what actually happened, and whether it's stepped outside the phrasing rules I set. Drift gets corrected. Rule breaks get sent back to be written again.

The instructions I hand over are more detailed than they sound. The first-person voice is fixed to one form and not allowed to wander — that, I think, was the reason: so it doesn't blur and stop reading like one person's record. Technical terms get unpacked the first time they appear; that came from not wanting anyone to read on without knowing what a word meant, and I've kept it. Nothing written to bait a click, because baiting someone into reading leaves nothing behind afterwards — or that's how it felt at the time. Then the temperature of the prose — this log-like register. Dozens of items or so, all decided in advance.

So it isn't that the AI writes freely. It feels closer to pouring text into a mold I've already made. Which shifts the work to my side of the desk, into the instructions, and that takes time of its own.

Laying the split out like that, the case for hiding it thinned out on its own.

What came up instead was the other direction — the trouble that comes from hiding it.

There's what happens when it surfaces later. Something read as a person's writing turns out to have been generated, and the trust that was there goes at once. Close to someone running a business without the company name on the door and having it found out afterwards. Better to have it out front.

Then there's the reader's own footing. Once it's clear the text was generated, it reads as generated writing — a procedure gets checked before anyone tries it, a number looked up somewhere else, just in case. Hide it and there's nothing to read it against.

And it works on me. Having said it out loud, I can't push out something slack, and the pressure stays on. Writing gets less careless when someone might be looking — I've written about that before, I think, and this isn't an extension of it so much as the same thing still running. Knowing it will be read changes what actually gets done. At the point where wrapping it up carelessly starts to look attractive, the fact that it's going out comes back, and it goes through one more pass. A dull loop, but publishing is its own check on me.

One more rule, while I'm here: the phrase doesn't get reworded on a whim. "AI-assisted" one day, "with AI support" the next, "AI-aided" after that — the wording could have drifted all it liked, and I decided it wouldn't. Let it drift and there's no telling how far the AI actually goes. Like changing the company name on paperwork sent to a client each time: not meant as evasion, but it reads as choosing words to blur something.

Across the different places it goes, the wording bends a little. On the blog it's about the whole thing; where pieces are read one at a time, it's about the piece. The edges follow the medium, and the core — made in collaboration with AI — stays put wherever it goes.

A fixed line at the bottom of the page, and nothing more than that. Still, it's what keeps me from losing track of where my own work ended. Without it, things slide back before I notice.