Ask Claude.....

On being told to ask Claude as a joke, what these posts actually cost, and why the honest alternative was never a better post — it was no post at all.

I asked my Facebook network recently whether anybody could recommend an emergency plumber, and within a few minutes somebody had replied, "ask Claude :)". I will come back to the plumbing at the end. What I want to deal with first is what that comment was actually about, because it was not really about plumbing at all, and the smiley face was doing an enormous amount of work.

I write about anxiety here, and I use AI to help me do it, and I have never pretended otherwise. That combination seems to sit badly with a certain kind of person, and the way it tends to come out is not as a question or an argument but as a little aside, a nudge, a joke that lets the person making it register disapproval whilst keeping the option of saying they were only messing about. I would honestly rather somebody just said what they meant.

So let me say what I mean, and start with how these posts are actually made, because I suspect the picture in people's heads is that I type "write a blog post about anxiety" and paste the result.

How these posts get made

It starts with me talking. Usually badly, in the wrong order, going off on things that turn out not to matter and skipping the parts that do. I describe what happened, what it felt like at the time, what I thought was going on then and what I think now, and the AI asks me questions about the bits that are vague, which is uncomfortable in a useful way, because a vague memory is easy to write around and a specific one has to be faced. Then we work out a shape, and I get a draft back, and quite often the draft is wrong.

It is wrong in ways I have got better at spotting. It reaches for a tidy lesson at the end of every paragraph. It loves a rhythm of three, it loves the construction "it was not this, it was that", and left alone it will use em dashes everywhere and American spellings, none of which sound like me. So there is now a file that holds my voice, a list of the tells I do not want, and a record of what is actually true about my life, which exists mainly so that nothing gets invented. That last part matters more to me than any of the rest of it. The concussion, the six months of being certain there was a tumour, the bath, the bedtime stories I sat through without being able to tell you afterwards what happened in the book: all of that is mine, and none of it happened to a machine.

Then we go round again. And again. I cut things, I put things back, I rewrite the bits that sound like an article rather than a person, and by the time a post goes out I have read every sentence in it several times and thrown away a great deal more than I kept. Collaboration is the honest word for it. The thinking is mine, the memories are mine, the judgement about what is true and what I am willing to say in public is entirely mine, and what I get in return is help turning a mess of half-formed thoughts into something a reader can follow.

What it actually costs

I should say at this point that I can write. I have spent nearly thirty years in IT, and a surprising amount of that career has been writing: comms that had to explain an outage to a few thousand people who were already annoyed, run books that somebody would be following at three in the morning without me there to clarify anything, procedures, user messaging, the wording of a notification that has to be understood correctly on the first read by people who are not going to read it twice. None of that was written with any help at all, and a fair bit of it was written under more pressure than a Substack post has ever put me under. So when the suggestion is that people using AI cannot string a sentence together, that is not my situation, and I suspect it is not the situation of most of the people being sniffed at.

The posts in this series run to well over a thousand words each. Even with help, one takes hours: hours of talking it through, hours of reading it back, hours spent deciding whether a paragraph about my son is something I want strangers reading. Without help it would take considerably longer, and I want to be blunt about the fact that I do not have those hours, and neither do most people with a job, a family and a finite amount of energy.

That is the part I find difficult to be gracious about. Writing something and publishing it under your own name has a cost. It costs time you could have spent doing something easier, and if the subject is personal it costs a bit more than that, because you are handing people something they can use against you if they feel like it. Leaving a two-word comment underneath somebody else's work costs nothing at all. There is a particular kind of person who has never published a thing in their life, who has never had to decide how much of themselves to put on a page, and who nonetheless has firm views about the standard of authenticity everybody else ought to be meeting. I do not think that position deserves the respect it usually gets. It is not a higher standard, it is just a seat further back.

I will grant the reasonable version of the complaint, which is that there is a lot of thoughtless machine-generated filler being pushed into the world at the moment and most of us are tired of reading it. I am tired of reading it too. But the answer to that is whether the person whose name is on the thing has actually thought about it and stands behind every line, and on that I am comfortable.

The comparison nobody makes

The thing that irritates me most is that the comparison being made is a false one. The implied alternative to a post written this way is a better post written the hard way, and for me that post does not exist. The real alternative is nothing. Silence, and a series of things I never got round to saying.

When I wrote about my anxiety on Facebook last year, several people messaged me privately. Not publicly, not in the comments, but quietly, on their own, to say that it had helped, and some of them were people I would never have guessed were carrying anything at all. That is the whole reason this series exists. Whatever anybody thinks about how the sentences were assembled, those messages were real, and I am fairly confident that not one of those people would have preferred I wrote nothing because the process was not pure enough.

There is also something slightly funny about being lectured on authenticity in a medium where nobody has ever asked whether a public figure wrote their own book, their own speech, or their own eulogy. Ghostwriting has been an ordinary and respectable job for a very long time. The objection is not really to help; it is to help being cheap enough that people like me can have it.

If you have been putting something off

If there is something you have been meaning to write and the only thing stopping you is that you do not think of yourself as a writer, or that you know it will take you a whole weekend to produce something that still reads badly, then I would use the help. The words that matter are the ones only you can supply, which are what happened, what it felt like, and what you understand now that you did not understand then, and no machine can hand you any of those. Everything else is typing.

And if somebody makes a little joke about it in the comments, it is worth noticing that they are still sitting there, not writing anything, whilst your thing is out in the world doing something. I will admit that some of my irritation about all this is aimed at the part of me that half agreed with them.

As for the plumbing. The plumber I eventually got hold of could not help, so I went to B&Q, worked out what I needed, went back to B&Q a second time for the thing I had not realised I needed, and fixed the toilet myself. It was not beyond me. It was never going to be beyond me. What I did not have on the day it started leaking was the time, or the appetite, to work all that out from scratch whilst everything else in the house carried on needing me, which is why I went looking for somebody who already knew. That is roughly where I am with the writing too, and I am not sure why one of those is a sensible use of a Sunday and the other is a moral failing.

← Writing · Andy Bridson