Since When Did AI Become Like Politics?

When did checking your own writing for “AI words” become a whole personality? There is a running list floating around content teams: delve, seamless, elevate, meticulous, underscore. Not because any of them stopped meaning what they’ve always meant. Because they got popular with ChatGPT, and popularity started reading as guilt.

Here’s my take: I don’t care.

I don't care if you use AI. I don't care if you don't use AI. I promise I am not running your paragraphs through a fine tooth comb hunting for "honestly" or "I'll be real with you" or whatever the tell of the week is. That's not a hobby of mine. I have actual things to worry about.

Somewhere in the last two years, “do you use AI” turned into this weirdly moral question, like it’s asking whether you cheat on your taxes. The moment that really clicked for me was when I saw people joking that we couldn’t use the word “delve” anymore because ChatGPT uses it too often. The comments were full of people saying, “Nooo, not that word too.” That’s when I realized we weren’t even talking about writing anymore. We were talking about avoiding certain words because someone might assume AI was involved. People post their word ban lists like badges of integrity. Other people get side eyed because their blog post used “delve” twice. It's giving witch hunt. It's giving gotcha journalism. It's giving politics: pick a side, defend it loudly, and treat the other side like they've lost the plot.

I’ve seen people say using AI “damages your credibility.” Damages it with who? The reader-approval board? Nobody scrolling LinkedIn can actually see which parts came from you and which came from a chatbot. All they can see is the sentence in front of them, and what they assume came from ChatGPT or not. Credibility was never about whether AI touched your content. It’s about whether the content is correct.

Writing isn't a team sport with a moral high ground. It's a tool doing a job. If the sentence is clear and it says what you meant, I don't care what got it there: your brain, a thesaurus, a ghostwriter, or a chatbot. The result is the result.

That whole "delve" panic proves my point. It wasn't banned because it stopped working. It got banned because it got popular, and popularity became suspicious. That's not an editorial standard, that's a vibe check. We didn't decide the word was bad. We decided liking the same thing as a robot was embarrassing.

Strip away the word lists and what’s left is just ego.

If I learned anything in a decade of corporate America, it is to stop caring so much about what other people think. I left high school a long time ago. Some people clearly did not, they just must have peaked there. Reality check: it is uncool to judge someone else's writing over a technicality, as if AI touching it means it 'doesn't count' as theirs anymore. Countess Luann de Lesseps from RHONY said it best: be cool. don't be all…like, uncool.

So here's my actual policy, out loud, in public: I use AI. Responsibly. Strategically. Sometimes for a first draft, sometimes for a sanity check, sometimes not at all. I'm not going to pretend otherwise to win points in a debate nobody needed to have. I’m certainly not going to pretend I didn’t use it to get a stranger’s approval. And I'm not going to judge the next person for doing it differently.

Use AI. Don't use AI. Use it for some things and not others. Just make the thing good. As long as you're proud of it, I'm happy for ya.

Delve delve delve.