Thanks, ChatGPT

I spent four months writing a book. Not prompting one, writing one. The ideas behind it have been accumulating for decades: how systems break, how communities repair themselves, and how certain patterns survive even when everything around them changes.

The book is about 176 pages and is part story, part philosophy, and part reflection on the strange overlap between technology and human relationships.

Before the book there were other pieces.

A role-playing game I designed years ago that slowly stopped behaving like a game and started behaving like a model of how people learn together.

A software project mapping ideas like courage, patience, and humility to color and tone, an experiment in whether moral language could be visualized.

And a network platform built to help keep a small regional newspaper alive after a flood wiped out nearly a quarter of the people in its community.

Each piece took months, sometimes years, to figure out.

So when someone reads something I’ve written and says:

“Thanks, ChatGPT.”

…it lands oddly.

Not as an insult exactly. More like a shrug.

A way of saying: this looks polished, therefore it must have been easy.

The Shortcut Explanation

People have always done this when new tools appear.

When photography was invented, painters said it was mechanical cheating.

When word processors appeared, critics said writing had become effortless.

Now AI has taken that role. Smooth prose gets treated as evidence that a machine must have produced it.

But the surface of a piece of writing isn’t the work.

The work is everything behind it.

The years of thinking about an idea.

The experiments that fail.

The structures that only reveal themselves after you’ve carried them around long enough.

Tools can help shape a sentence.

They can’t compress decades of experience into it.

Clarity Can Look Like Effortlessness

There’s another irony here.

The clearer writing becomes, the easier it is for people to assume it took no effort.

But clarity usually means the opposite.

It means the author removed the scaffolding.

The complicated language.

The academic padding.

The inside jokes and references that only specialists understand.

My natural writing voice is actually pretty dense, closer to a professor lecturing than a storyteller.

Sometimes AI tools help me translate that voice into something simpler.

Not to dilute the ideas, but to make them travel further.

Good ideas shouldn’t require a specialized dialect just to be heard.

With that in mind, it might also be worth considering how many people are reading and interpreting works with AI assistance. How many people are translating works from foreign tongues into their native languages? How AI best understands and can make sense of writing that was created by other AI?

The Work Beneath the Surface

One of the projects I’m proudest of doesn’t look impressive at all from the outside.

It’s a platform that keeps a small community newspaper running online.

Someone in Florida can log in and download the PDF of their hometown paper.

They see the news, the classifieds, maybe listen to the radio stream.

That’s it.

They don’t see the months of work that went into building the system that keeps the paper stable and ad-free.

They don’t need to.

If the water comes out clean, the pipes are doing their job.

The Long Way Around

The book I just finished grew out of the same pattern as those earlier projects.

Characters appeared that carried pieces of ideas I’d been thinking about for years.

One laughs in the kitchen after burning bread, because sometimes relief and grief arrive at the same moment.

Another carries a small urn for decades, turning pain into a kind of humor.

The story kept circling the same discovery: that relationship, not individual, are where the real transformations happen.

That love isn’t just a feeling between people.

It’s a field people create together.

The Real Audience

When someone reads something I’ve written and jokes “Thanks, ChatGPT,” I try to remember something.

The person who matters most probably isn’t the commenter.

It’s the reader who quietly gets what they needed from the work.

The grandmother downloading her hometown paper.

The stranger who finds an essay years later and recognizes a thought they’ve been trying to articulate themselves.

Writing has always worked like that.

Most of the time you don’t know who the real readers are.

You’re writing for witnesses who may not exist yet.

The Pattern Isn’t Owned

Some days it’s still frustrating.

Why spend years shaping an idea if the result gets mistaken for a button press?

But over time I’ve realized something.

Ideas like this don’t really belong to anyone.

People carry them for a while.

They shape them, express them, and pass them along.

Eventually someone else picks them up and continues the work.

However the Signal Travels

New tools change how writing happens.

They change how readers interpret it, too.

But the deeper question isn’t whether a sentence was polished with software or written by hand.

The question is whether something real made it through the page.

Whether a signal survived the noise.

If it did, the route it traveled almost doesn’t matter.

Even if the route includes a machine.

Even if someone jokes:

“Thanks, ChatGPT.”