I’ve been thinking about authorship lately. What it even means now. What counts as writing in the era of AI, and where the actual line lives between the tool and the person using it.

The more I sit with it, the more I think authorship has less to do with who physically typed the sentence and more to do with perception. Who noticed the thing. Who carried the question. Who spent years turning an idea over before it ever became language. Who knows when a sentence is true, when it’s almost true, and when it completely misses the point.

I’ve always wanted to be a writer. A singer too, but there’s no AI in the world that’s going to fix that particular situation, so we’ll leave it there.

For most of my career I hired writers. I gave them briefs, shaped the direction, approved the copy, and it worked very well. I hired super talented people over the years. Most of that work was built for SEO and digital publishing. Restaurant guides. Travel pieces. Service articles. Ranking content. The writing didn’t need to come from my inner philosophical world to succeed. It needed to be useful, strategic, clear, and well written, and a lot of it genuinely was.

But somewhere in there I became very skilled at producing frameworks for other voices while never fully risking my own.

This publication is different. It’s built around my perspective on participation, connection, sensory life, memory, relationships, and what it actually feels like to stay engaged with your own life as you move through the world. You can’t outsource that to other writers.

AI changed that. Not because it writes for me, but because it finally lets me write. If you work with AI the way I do, you just nodded at that sentence and also immediately spotted the contradictory statement sitting in the middle of it.

These are thoughts that have been rattling around in me for a lifetime. The perspective, the voice, the thing I’m actually trying to say, that’s mine. AI helps me shape it, find the sentence that says the true thing instead of the almost-true thing.

For the first time, I have an entire digital publication written by me, not hired writers. After more than two decades in digital publishing, that feels exhillerating. I’m finally doing the thing I was meant to do. I’m no longer managing the production of content from a distance. I’m inside the actual act of saying what I mean. Messily. Iteratively. With discernment. With obsession. With twenty-seven rewrites and a weird parenthetical joke about contradictory statements surviving the editing process like a raccoon that keeps getting back into the garage.

Tools can amplify perspective, sharpen it, clarify it, even challenge it. But there has to be an actual way of seeing underneath the tool. Something that was already there.

The imagery works the same way.

My husband Steve is a photographer and videographer and we have real creative capacity in-house. The limitation was never budget, it was time. And stock photography rarely captured what I was actually after anyway.

Life is messy. Warm. Specific. Half-finished. Emotionally uneven in ways polished imagery tends to smooth over.

I keep chasing images that feel emotionally true to the moments they’re trying to capture, a particular quality of light, a sense of memory, the texture of an ordinary moment that says something bigger underneath it.

AI image generation gets me closer than stock ever did, even if it often takes dozens of attempts to get there. It’s a new tool and it’s improving fast and we’re figuring it out as we go.

None of this is a confession. It’s just how we work.

And yes, we’re aware of the tension in that. AI has real costs. Environmental ones. Human ones. The creative industries are in genuine pain right now, writers and illustrators and photographers watching their livelihoods erode in ways that are not okay. The volume of hollow, careless, AI-generated content flooding the internet is a real problem, culturally and ecologically. I’m going to write about all of it, because it matters and because looking away from the thing you’re participating in is its own kind of dishonesty.

I use these tools anyway. Thoughtfully, I hope. With my actual perception behind them.

Every piece here started as a thread I needed to pull on because it wouldn’t leave me alone. The bottleneck was always translation. The tool just helped get it out.