This Is Still Me Speaking

Part I: The Panic — When Clarity Became Suspicious

INTRODUCTION: The Sentence That Got Me Banned

I was banned from a writing subreddit for a sentence that wasn’t wrong—but apparently, felt too right.

The mod’s reply wasn’t about content. It was about tone:

“You’ve even used AI to write this message. Sorry, that’s not welcome here ever. We only allow human interaction.”

No discussion. No conversation. No curiosity about what I was actually saying. Just a blanket assumption that because it sounded articulate, it must have been faked. Or finessed. Or—worse—helped.

And yes, it was. I use AI to help clarify my ideas. I’ve said so openly. I don’t hide it. But here’s what I won’t do: pretend that makes my work less mine.

I don’t write every word. I write the intention.
I shape the message. I own the voice. I am the one showing up.

AI helps me test phrasing, restructure thoughts, or make a muddy sentence breathe. Sometimes it suggests a framing I hadn’t considered, or sharpens the emotional tone. But that doesn’t mean I’ve handed over authorship. It means I’m listening to the work from another angle. One that helps me refine.

And yet, I got banned—for sounding too clear. Not for breaking a rule. For breaking an illusion. The illusion that good writing must be slow, solitary, and visibly human.

We’ve entered an age where clarity itself is suspicious, and the better you get at expressing yourself, the more likely someone is to accuse you of being artificial.

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1. The AI Line, and How It Got Drawn

There’s a lot of fear in the air right now—about automation, about truth, about identity. AI becomes the scapegoat for all of it.

In writing communities especially, we’ve watched that fear harden into rules:

• No AI content allowed.
• Human-only interaction.
• No machine assistance whatsoever.

But these rules don’t really enforce quality. They enforce tone-based gatekeeping. If something sounds too fluid, too composed, too emotionally balanced—it’s flagged. Not because it’s dishonest, but because it’s threatening.

What AI actually threatens isn’t authenticity.
It’s control.

Because if a writer can produce thoughtful, well-formed ideas without going through the usual rituals of pain, perfectionism, and process… what happens to the people who built their identity on suffering for craft?

That’s where this really lands: the assumption that polish = artifice, and that imperfection = proof of humanity. It’s backwards. And it’s everywhere.

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2. Even My Mistake Doesn’t Justify the Reaction

Let me own this: there was a mistake. A chunk of one of my posts didn’t paste properly. Something got lost in the edit, and I didn’t catch it before I hit send.

That kind of sloppiness isn’t about AI—it’s about me not rereading carefully. It happens. But it doesn’t mean the rest of the message wasn’t real. Or considered. Or mine.

I understand that mistake may have amplified suspicion. But the punishment I got wasn’t about one missing phrase. It was about the tone of the rest—about how confident, clean, or unnatural it “felt” to the mod reading it.

That’s what scares me. Not the error. The standard.
We’ve created platforms that don’t care what you mean—only how convincingly flawed you sound while saying it.

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3. I Don’t Write Every Word. I Write the Intent.

This is where I have to be honest—more honest than the discourse usually allows.

I don’t sit down and bleed onto the page, alone in the dark, writing each word in a holy trance. I’ve done that. I can do that. But when I’m at my best? I’m iterating. Curating. Clarifying. Sometimes with human feedback. Sometimes with AI-assisted phrasing. Always with intention.

I treat AI as a tool—not for generating ideas, but for organizing them. Testing tone. Pushing clarity. It’s like drafting out loud to a trusted reader who never gets tired. The content still comes from me. The emotion, the memory, the point of view—that’s mine. What AI gives me is reflection. Feedback. Options.

And if the result is clearer, stronger, or more emotionally honest than I could have reached on the first try? That’s not deception. That’s craft.

So no—I don’t write every word by hand. But I stand behind every word that survives the process.

That’s authorship. That’s presence.
That’s me.

Part II: The Gate — Who Gets to Speak, and How

4. Gatekeeping in Disguise: From Absolute Write to Reddit

Let’s name it: most online writing communities are built on a quiet social contract.

• You suffer to get better.
• You labor alone.
• You earn the right to be taken seriously by paying your dues—in time, rejection, or proximity to publishing.

And if you don’t?

You’re suspect. Not because your writing is bad. But because you didn’t look like you suffered enough.

That was the vibe at Absolute Write, long before the AI debate exploded. The culture there thrived on hierarchy—on being close to agents, publishers, or hard-earned scars. You were expected to lurk, to listen, to humble yourself before the altar of “real” writers.

When AI arrived, it wasn’t just seen as a threat to art—it was seen as a threat to status. Suddenly, someone without an MFA, without an agent, without the correct origin story, could use a tool to sound composed, intelligent, even emotionally resonant.

That broke the illusion. And the forums turned hostile.

What we’re seeing now on Reddit, Twitter, Discord, and other spaces is the same instinct: to protect the gates by policing not just quality, but process—and punishing anyone who admits to finding a shortcut that doesn’t feel like the “real work.”

It’s not about ethics. It’s about eligibility.

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5. Why AI Threatens Traditional Power Structures

AI blurs every line these communities were built on:

• Who gets to be heard?
• Who gets to sound good?
• Who’s earned the right to be taken seriously?

Before, if you wrote well, people assumed you were legit. Now, if you write well—especially as a newcomer—you’re assumed to be fake.

It doesn’t matter if the writing is good. It matters if your story of how it got written matches what people expect from “real” writers.

That’s the danger: AI use becomes shorthand for unearned talent, even when the talent was always there and the tool just helped shape it.

Let’s say that plainly:

This isn’t a craft conversation anymore. It’s a control mechanism.

People who built their identity around the difficulty of writing feel personally challenged by someone who can reach emotional clarity faster—even if the emotion is real. They see AI not as a tool, but as a violation of process hierarchy. A cheat code. A lie.

But what if it’s not a lie?

What if it’s just a better way of saying something true?

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6. Polished Means Guilty: The New Rules of Online Authorship

We’ve entered a strange new stage of authorship, where clean prose is a red flag, and the presence of AI in your process makes you guilty until proven human.

This is the new orthodoxy:

• If your writing is messy, you’re “real.”
• If your writing is tight, you’re “suspicious.”
• If you used AI to shape a paragraph—even just to reorder a thought—you’ve violated the covenant.

It doesn’t matter that you poured your life into the story.
It doesn’t matter that you’re being transparent.
It doesn’t matter that the emotional arc is real.

What matters is that you used a tool to get there. And that’s unforgivable—not because it hurt anyone, but because it redefined the sacred suffering others had invested in.

This is gatekeeping disguised as moral high ground. It’s tone-policing as community protection. But really, it’s fear.

Fear that authorship is changing.
Fear that clarity no longer guarantees control.
Fear that some of us—those with stories to tell, but not always the tools—have found a way to say it louder, faster, truer.

And instead of celebrating that? We’re being told to sit back down.

Part III: The Tool — Why I Still Use AI, and Why I’m Not Sorry

7. What AI Actually Does in My Process

Let’s make this clear:
I don’t use AI to write for me. I use it to write with me.

It’s not a ghostwriter. It’s not a button I push and call it done. It’s a tool—more mirror than machine. I bring the idea. The intention. The voice. What AI gives me is perspective. Iteration. Distance.

It lets me test phrasing quickly. It helps me notice when I’m rambling or reaching. It lets me rearrange the scaffolding of a thought so I can see the structure more clearly.

And sometimes, yes—it gives me language I wouldn’t have landed on alone. But when that happens, I don’t mind. Because I still know what I meant. And I still decide whether those words say it better.

That’s not cheating. That’s a collaborative draft process. That’s creative integrity with better feedback loops.

This isn’t automation—it’s attention.

I don’t write every word. I write the reason they exist.

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8. This Isn’t New: All Writing Is Collaborative

The fear around AI often hinges on a romantic myth: that writing should be solitary. That a “true” author suffers alone in the dark, bleeding brilliance onto the page with no help and no shortcuts.

But that myth has never been true.

• Writers have always relied on editors, critique partners, workshops, beta readers, copyeditors, and agents.
• We’ve used spellcheck, style guides, and yes—Grammarly or ProWritingAid.
• We rewrite based on feedback. We outline. We revise. We obsess.

What makes AI different is that it removes the lag time. You don’t have to wait weeks for feedback. You don’t have to guess if your opening paragraph is clear. You don’t have to suffer through twenty drafts just to find your emotional center.

And that’s what makes people uneasy. Because it breaks the illusion of isolation—and reveals that most writing was never as “pure” as people pretended.

But here’s the key difference:

AI doesn’t erase authorship. It reveals what authorship really is.

It’s not about the first draft. It’s about decisions. Voice. Intention. Presence. What you keep. What you cut. What you mean.

That’s still human. That’s still art. That’s still mine.

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9. The Ethical Use Case: AI as Amplifier, Not Impostor

So let’s draw a better line—one that’s actually useful.

Instead of banning AI outright, what if we asked:

• Is this work honest?
• Does it serve the reader?
• Is the author present in the process—not just in output, but in intention?

Because if the answer is yes, then the tool used doesn’t make the work less valid. It makes it more clear. More shaped. More open.

Here’s what I believe:

• If you’re being transparent about your process—
• If you’re using AI to refine rather than replace—
• If the work is emotionally anchored and thoughtfully made—

Then you are not the problem.

You are the future of authorship, already in motion.

Part IV: The Facade — Where the Real Exploitation Lives

10. Professionalism for Sale: Reedsy and the Author Funnel

Let’s talk about where the real problem is—not in AI, but in the platforms that pretend to support writers while quietly draining them.

Reedsy is a great example. On the surface, it looks like a dream: a curated marketplace of professional editors, designers, marketers, and publicists, all “just a quote away.”

But the deeper you go, the clearer the structure becomes:

Reedsy isn’t a community. It’s a funnel.

The goal isn’t connection. It’s conversion. You’re encouraged to enter their ecosystem, receive bids, and hire professionals—usually at steep rates justified by vague promises of polish and “industry-standard quality.” But there’s no guarantee of an audience. No discovery system. No data. Just the faint hope that if you pay enough, you’ll look like a real author.

And maybe you will.
But who’s going to see it?

These platforms sell professionalism, not readership.
They sell the feeling of being taken seriously—without giving you any path to actually reach readers who might care.

And worse? They do it while looking down on anyone who chooses to do things differently.

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11. The Cover Discourse Is a Lie

Nowhere is the hypocrisy clearer than in the AI art panic.

Let’s be honest: most indie covers—even professionally designed ones—look like warmed-over stock photography with a gradient and a serif. And Amazon’s default cover tools are offensively bad. They scream “cheap,” no matter how good your story is.

So authors, understandably, turned to AI image tools.

Not because they wanted to cheat. Because they wanted something that looked like it belonged. Something genre-appropriate. Something with a little soul.

And they started getting it. Not perfect art—but compelling design. Something that actually felt like the book inside. The backlash was immediate.

Suddenly, the argument wasn’t about taste. It was about ethics. AI art was “stealing.” It was “unfair to artists.” It was “ruining the industry.” But the subtext was clear:

“How dare you make something beautiful without paying us first?”

It’s not that artists don’t deserve to be paid. They do.
But in the indie world, where most writers are losing money on every release, it’s unreasonable to pretend that spending $700 on a single visual asset is always viable. Especially when those same gatekeepers are also selling access to “ethically sourced” cover design—for a price.

The truth is: AI covers democratized aesthetics. And that scared people who were used to gatekeeping beauty.

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12. Who Really Profits from AI Fear?

It’s not about readers.
It’s not about ethics.
It’s about control, and money.

When AI tools gave indie authors access to editing, design, and creative feedback without going through high-cost platforms, the panic wasn’t really about quality.

It was about what happens when the gate is no longer locked. When you don’t have to hire a Reedsy editor to tighten a chapter. When you don’t have to use a designer’s favorite font. When you don’t have to wait to be chosen in order to sound like someone worth reading.

This is what’s really under threat:

A system that monetizes insecurity by selling authors their own legitimacy back to them.

That’s why they fight so hard to paint AI use as dishonest. Not because it hurts art. But because it bypasses the toll booth.

Conclusion: I’m Still Here. Still Writing.

Let’s stop pretending this is about AI.

This is about power—who has it, who’s allowed to use it, and who gets punished when they learn to use it well.

It’s about communities that claim to champion creativity but only if it arrives in the right voice, through the right channels, with the right scars. It’s about platforms that dress up extraction as empowerment. And it’s about a culture so afraid of losing control that it treats clarity as a crime.

But through all of it, here I am.
Still writing.

Still showing up with stories to tell—some of them messy, some of them sharp. Some built slowly, some shaped with help.
But all of them mine.

I don’t write every word alone. I don’t believe I have to. What I write is intention. Meaning. Voice. Memory. Message.
And when AI helps me say that more clearly? I’m not ashamed. I’m grateful.

That clarity didn’t make me a fraud. It made me visible—and that’s what they couldn’t tolerate.

Because if I can sound like I belong without their permission…
If I can say something true without their tools…
If I can find resonance outside their system…

Then maybe I’m not the one they’re afraid of.
Maybe it’s what I represent.

A writer who won’t play by the purity rules.
A creator who won’t wait to be chosen.
A voice that doesn’t need a gate.

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You can ban me.
You can dismiss me.
You can call me artificial.

But if the words came from what I lived—
If the shape of the sentence was drawn from memory, and doubt, and grief, and care—

Then this is still me speaking.

And I’m not done yet.