Why I remain the author when AI helps me write

Suppose I’m working on an article for this site and I have a conversation about it with a friend. I tell him what I’m thinking, and he offers an observation I hadn’t considered. Maybe he tells me something I didn’t know. Maybe he challenges an assumption I’ve made. Our conversation helps me develop my thinking, and the article I eventually write is better for it. Would anyone question whether the article was my own work? I don’t think so. Writers have always developed their ideas through conversations with other people, through reading and research, and through feedback from editors. Such outside contributions can materially improve what we write. We don’t ordinarily regard them as diminishing our authorship. That’s the easy case, though. Friends generally don’t contribute actual text to your writing. AI can do much of what a friend or editor can do for something you write — but it can also do some or all of the writing. For roughly the past year, I’ve sometimes used artificial…

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