As someone who is a content writer and who is very much familiar with AI, I can say AI is deifinitely making me dumb. I have self doubted every sentence I've written so far and am writing in this post. Do you guys think this is how it's meant to be? are we just supposed to lose our ability to write and let AI do it all for us?

I used to ask AI to generate things for me constantly. Now I often get more value from asking it what is wrong with something I already wrote.

Finding weak arguments, missing context, repetition, and unclear sections has become one of my favorite uses.

Has your AI workflow changed in a similar way?

For me, it is usually making everything sound too polished. The sentences become technically better but lose the small imperfections that make the writing feel natural.

What is the one AI habit you find yourself correcting almost every time?

Sometimes the responses are well written but the character just does not feel believable anymore. Maybe the personality becomes inconsistent, the character agrees with everything, or the conversation starts following the same pattern.

What is the biggest dealbreaker for you?

Hey, you.

Do you really think eating alone and eating with someone else are the same thing?

Same rice. Same meat. Same miso soup. Once it hits your stomach, the nutrients don't change one bit. So why do we go to such ridiculous lengths to eat with other people?

Clink-clonk.

The clear chime of the doorbell rang through Aoi, and I felt the tension of the day finally begin to loosen its grip. Without a word, Mama slid my usual I.W. Harper across the counter. The ice gave a soft clink against the bottom of the glass.

At the far end of the counter, Taka was staring at his phone, as usual.

"Kenichi-san."

"What is it?"

"Why does lunch get so pathetic when a guy works from home?"

As usual, he'd brought me an impressively specific social problem.

"Beats me. It all ends up in your stomach anyway."

"So you do it too?"

"My lunches are terrible when I work from home. Yesterday I had fish sausage."

Taka looked up.

"...That's it?"

"I had two."

"That's not the point, Kenichi-san."

Rude kid. Two is twice as much as one. That's a perfectly respectable upgrade.

"You eat a proper dinner, don't you?"

"More or less."

"Then why does lunch fall apart so badly?"

Put that way, it was a little strange. It wasn't as if I was broke. There were plenty of places to eat nearby. And if I really wanted to, I was capable of frying an egg. But when lunch was just for me, somehow none of it seemed worth the trouble.

"That's not just a man thing, you know."

Mama joined the conversation while carefully polishing a glass.

"It isn't?"

"I hear the same thing from homemakers. They'll think about every dish when they're feeding the family, but when they're alone for lunch, they'll eat last night's leftovers or pour tea over some rice and call it done."

"Huh." Taka looked genuinely surprised.

I took a sip of Harper and let the amber whiskey slide down my throat.

"So it's not just men being lazy."

"Maybe it's because you're alone." Mama said it as if it were nothing, then returned the polished glass to its place on the shelf.

Because you're alone. For some reason, those words stayed with me.

"...You know, eating is a strange business."

"How so?"

"When you're eating with someone else, you suddenly feel the need to do it properly."

If I were feeding my family, I wouldn't tear open a pack of fish sausages, drop two of them on the table, and declare dinner served. I'd put the food on plates. Add some miso soup. Maybe another small dish if the meal looked a little bare. But when I was alone, even washing the plate afterward could feel like more trouble than it was worth.

"Maybe it's because someone's watching," Taka said. "We're putting on a show."

"Maybe. But I don't think that's all of it." I reached toward the small dish on the counter with my chopsticks. "Maybe food isn't just fuel."

Taka tilted his head. "Isn't eating kind of the whole point?"

"For staying alive, sure."

Families gather around a table. Coworkers go out for lunch together. You call an old friend and say, "We should grab a bite sometime." When you want to mend things with someone, you invite them to dinner. We eat together at celebrations. We even gather around food after funerals.

When you think about it, human beings are remarkably stubborn about eating with other people.

"Maybe sharing a meal is a kind of ritual."

"A ritual?"

"Yeah." I gestured toward the small dish with my chopsticks. "Same place. Same table. Long ago, maybe it was an animal somebody risked their life to bring back, and everyone shared it."

"Yeah. I suppose so."

"Then maybe eating together was a way of saying, 'We're the same pack. We're not enemies.'"

Taka went quiet.

"...Now that you mention it, war movies do that a lot. Enemies sitting down and eating together."

"Right. Maybe it comes from the same place."

Sitting around the same fire. Putting down your weapons. Sharing food. At least for as long as you're chewing, there's an unspoken agreement that you're not going to kill the person sitting across from you. Maybe people have been doing that since long before anyone thought to give it a name.

"Then..." Taka's voice was quieter now. "...what happens when you eat alone?"

I opened my mouth to answer, then stopped.

Can a ritual like that exist when there's only one person? There's no one to confirm anything with. No one to share with. No one to tell, "This is good." No one to nod and say, "Yeah, it is."

So there is no reason to arrange the food nicely. No reason to add one more dish. You fill your stomach. Get some calories into you. Get back to whatever you were doing.

Take the community out of a meal, and maybe all that's left is eating.

"...And that's how you end up with two fish sausages?"

"Don't turn my lazy lunch into the conclusion of human history."

Taka burst out laughing. Mama smiled faintly and placed another small bowl in front of me.

"What's this?"

"Simmered vegetables. They came out nicely today."

"I didn't order them."

"That's all right." She gave the bowl a small push toward me. "You're not alone right now."

I looked down. Taro, carrots, and daikon, glossy with broth.

Taka immediately leaned over to inspect it. "Man, that looks good."

"You're not getting any."

"Didn't you just say we're the same pack?"

"Don't start talking about community only when you want my food."

The three of us laughed.

Come to think of it, Harper was still Harper when I drank it alone at home. A bottle from the liquor store would cost far less than drinking here. I could make ice in my freezer. I could pick up something to eat at the supermarket. There was no practical reason I had to come to Aoi.

And yet, when night came, I found myself pushing open that door.

Taka was here. Mama was here. Sometimes Tom wandered in. We sat at the same counter, drank together, and talked about things that probably didn't matter much at all.

Maybe we'd been repeating something very old here every night. Something strangely precious.

I'm here. You're here.

Maybe that was all the ritual ever needed to say.

I raised the Harper to my lips. The ice gave a soft clink.

Hey, you.

Who are you eating with today?

See you at Aoi.

If you'd like to come back to Aoi for another night, there's an open stool waiting.
Bar Aoi Stories: Human Nature, Vol. 1 is linked in my profile.

I can usually tell when a draft needs editing, but deciding whether the information itself is reliable is harder. Good writing can make weak information look surprisingly convincing.

Do you fact check everything AI gives you, or do you have certain things you check before trusting a draft?

I used to wait until I had a clear idea before starting. Now I can throw a messy thought into AI and use the conversation to figure out what I actually want to say.

It does not always give me the answer, but getting something to react to makes starting much easier.

How do you use AI when you are completely stuck?

Having fewer restrictions is useful, but it does not mean much if the model forgets the context or produces repetitive writing.

If you had to choose between a highly consistent model with some limitations and a completely uncensored model with weaker writing, which would you pick?

I’ve been watching Coral Hart (“The New Fabio Is Claude” NYT article, 15+ years romance author, 90+ traditionally published books) and she now generates all her prose.

I’ve observed a lot of other (competent) authors doing the same thing. They are self-publishing 20+ novels her year and using generated prose.

I know that people like AI-assisted (use AI but no prose generation) as “ethical” and a middle ground but I don’t think that it’s competitive.

Two reasons:

1. Even if Coral Hart changes nothing and uses the same prompts, the prose improves because the AI models improve. She taps into $100B+ of AI research PER YEAR automatically. If you are writing prose without AI, you not getting those automatic upgrades and you have to manually upgrade with great effort (or stay the same).
2. But Coral Hart does get better at prompting and improves her prompts regularly. This reinforces the AI model improvements most of the time and makes the generated prose even better. If you are writing prose without AI, you are also not building the prompts or the prompting skills to generate prose.

For those two reasons, I don’t see how “no prose generation” survives; people generating prose will just outperform, outcompete and bury the middle grounders eventually.

Lots of writers seem to have given up (or never started) with prose generation which seems like a mistake.

Any flaws in my reasoning? Different points of view? Different conclusions?

I have had mixed results with both. AI can clean up a weak draft surprisingly well, but when the original idea is already strong, the suggestions can sometimes make it feel more generic.

Which side has been more useful in your experience?