Twice in the last few months, a client has asked me some version of the same question: Are you using AI to write?
Both times I gave a bad answer. Not a dishonest one — a rambling one. I said yes, and then spent the next four minutes qualifying it, and I could hear myself sounding defensive about something I don’t actually feel defensive about.
So I finally sat down and wrote it out properly. That page is on the site now.
But the part I want to tell you about is what happened while I was writing it, because I didn’t see it coming.
I sat down thinking I was documenting something new. What I found instead is that almost none of it is new.
I’ve had the same process for nearly two decades. Take a client interview and turn it into a page/post that ranks, converts, and keeps working. Six passes (i.e., steps) per piece of content, all of them offline, with my brain and typing fingers. I check the draft against what the client actually said, dig back through old interviews for a detail they mentioned once on a call that I vaguely recall (and need to find). Comb the website for internal links. Find the orphaned pages and give them somewhere to connect.
AI changed exactly one thing about that: I don’t start from a blank page anymore.
That’s the whole difference. It saves me hours, and I’m not going to apologize for that. But drafting was never where the value lived. It was the raw material I spent the rest of the day taking apart.
One thing did get added. There’s a pass now that didn’t exist three years ago, where I work the headline and the paragraph structure so an AI system can pull a clean answer out of the piece. That one is a new aspect of how I approach content creation, and it’s real work.
Everything else is what I’ve always done.
I think that’s why the question made me stumble. I heard, “Are you using AI?” as someone asking, “Did you hand your judgment to a machine?” And the honest answer is that the machine got handed the one part of this job I’d have been glad to hand off a decade ago.
Anyway, It’s written down now, which means the next time someone asks, I’ll have something better than four minutes of hedging.
If you want the long version — including why AI detection tools will probably flag my work, and why that matters less than people think — it’s here.