Every second blog post you read in 2026 was written by the same person. They have no opinions, no bad days, no skin in the game. They produce 800 words of confident-sounding prose in four seconds and they will never be embarrassed by any of it.
I've been letting that person into my workflow. Not for everything — but enough. A draft here. An outline there. A quick "clean this up" that turns my sentence into their sentence.
The result sits in a folder on my machine. It looks like writing. It reads like writing. It has my name on it.
Is it mine?
What AI writing actually costs you
In 2010 I wrote about owning fewer things. The real cost wasn't the stuff — it was the management layer. AI-generated writing is the same problem in a different container.
Every file I didn't actually write is a claim I made without earning it. It's a thought I didn't have, attributed to me.
The problem isn't that AI writes badly. The problem is that it writes fine. Fine is the danger. Fine doesn't embarrass you into fixing it. Fine slides into your archive and sits there, slowly diluting the signal.
The purge I keep almost doing
I've opened the folder a few times now. Looked at the drafts. Tried to remember what I actually believed when I started each one.
Some of them I can't remember. That feels like a problem.
The move I keep considering: delete everything I didn't write. Not edit, not rewrite — delete. If a draft exists because I handed the thinking to a language model, it goes.
What's left would be smaller. I think that's fine. Smaller and true beats larger and approximate. I learned that with the backpack. Same principle probably applies here.
I just haven't done it yet.
The irony is the point
This article was pitched to me by Claude. I picked it from a list of five. An AI suggested I write about questioning AI writing, and I said yes, and here we are.
That's not a gotcha. That's just where we are in 2026. The tools are inside the work. The question isn't whether to use them — the question is whether you're still the one thinking.
I'm the one thinking here. Whether the words are mine is a different question, and I don't have a clean answer.
The test, if you want one
Would I be comfortable saying "I wrote this" to someone whose opinion of my thinking I respect?
If yes, it stays. If there's any hesitation, it probably goes.
I'm going to go open the folder again.
Are you doing this too? Have you already done it, or decided it's not worth the trouble? I want to know. Email me: ev@evbogue.com