Yes, I use AI when I write. I also use a calculator when I do math, a car when I travel, and glasses when I read. Somehow only one of these gets me accused of cheating.
Since people seem curious, here is my actual process. I start by jotting down my own thinking, the raw ideas I want to say. I pull from years of my old documents, speeches, and memos for context. I use one AI tool to research and verify references on the topic (Perplexity).
I use another to pressure test which angle best serves the argument (OpenAI). Then I talk my thinking out loud into my phone, because I think better speaking than typing (IPhone). Finally I go back and forth with yet another AI (Claude), draft after draft, until the piece reads to my standards and sounds like me. Not the machine’s standards. Mine.
Notice what is missing from that process. At no point do I type “write me an essay” and walk away. The convictions, the scars, the thirty years of leading organizations, the point of view that keeps me up at night, those come from me, the old fashioned way.
What AI does is collapse time. A piece that once took six months of drafting and second guessing now takes days or weeks. The thinking is mine. The arguments are ones I will defend in any room.
If the ideas are weak, blame me. If the ideas are strong, also me. The tool never gets the credit or the blame. It just gets me to the conversation faster.
So when someone asks if AI wrote this, my answer is simple. No. I wrote this. The ideas were always there, waiting on a process that could keep up with them. The bottleneck was never the ideas. It was the six months. And I am done paying it.