I Let ChatGPT Write My Last Three Articles

What if technology just lets us destroy ourselves more efficiently?

It hasn’t been a productive week in my house. That’s the best way to describe it.

After trying to fight off the inevitable crashing and burning that came with the last few months, I lost the battle. Big time.

I knew it was coming, and I’ve had this crash and burn “scheduled” for two months. I’d even been counting down the days and hours until I could finally stop and relax for longer than a few hours.

But, alas, there is no rest for the wicked. Having just started this business venture, I knew that I just had to keep swimming, as Dory would say.

For the past two years, I have been a strong advocate for AI. I love it. I think that if it’s used well, it could be the biggest technological development ever. I’m always talking to ChatGPT about anything and everything.

As a content creator with Cerebral Palsy who uses AAC, the idea that I could use AI to drastically reduce the number of hours it takes to write an essay and the energy I’d have to expend each week was incredible, especially as I have recommitted to publishing an article every week. Do you think I have at least 10 hours a week to write an essay? Fuck no, not without neglecting other aspects of my life.

Especially these past two months.

I started this venture at a really fucking bad time. I had life shit that needed all my attention and resources for several months, or my life and the lives of the people I employ could have imploded – even as I type this article, I still don’t have answers to any of our questions. At the same time, I was preparing for my first boccia competition in two years.

But I knew I needed to start this business when I did, because it was becoming increasingly clear that I might need a regular income sooner rather than later. And the more I watch the system that has given me a life for the last thirteen years being driven into the ground harder than the missiles currently flying around the world, the more convinced I become that the only chance I have of keeping the life I’ve built is to somehow prioritise building an income with unlimited potential.

To say I was busy was the understatement of the century. Writing an essay on top of the thousand appointments and reports I had to get done was just a ridiculous ask of myself. That’s already a tough ask for me any time, let alone while I’m trying to keep my life from falling apart.

Hell, ChatGPT basically wrote my last three articles from start to finish, with a lot of help from me, of course, because I didn’t have the time or energy to produce them myself. I could have tried to, and a few years ago, I would have tried to do it all myself and then punished myself for not being able to do the full-time jobs of at least three people. Fuck, I still punish myself every time I decide to listen to my body, because that’s just the kind of life I’m coming from.

AI means that I can technically meet every impossible standard I need to meet (why couldn’t it have been around eight to ten years ago, when I was basically doing that much work with no way of reducing how much I had to do?), so I feel the need to finally meet the potential I’ve been told I have. Work a job, build a business, play boccia, all at once, because, after all, there is no rest for the wicked, and I’ll sleep when I’m dead.

I can finally do everything at once with the help of AI. So, I do. I’m still tired and slowly killing myself, but hey. They were right, I can be everything I want at once, I just need to use tools that allow me to do that without killing myself quite as much as I was. And strip myself out of the process.

So, I did the only thing a sane content creator in 2026 does and made ChatGPT my partner at every single step of the process.

I’d discuss what I wanted to try to think about, think about it with AI as my sparring partner, write the bones of the piece I was working on, give that to AI to get feedback and edits, then repeat that cycle until the piece was complete.

That is a surprisingly effective but time-consuming process, though it is quicker than writing and editing everything myself.

However, since I’ve been so busy and focused on other parts of my life, I’ve needed to use AI for most of the grunt work.

I’d talk to ChatGPT about the article’s general idea, figure out which details to include, and guide it to write the article as I would. Then we’d wrestle it into something publishable, or at least something that made the right points and wasn’t a complete disaster. Sometimes I’d write a couple of rough paragraphs to work from, which made it easier, but it would still take a lot of back-and-forth between me and the AI to get a piece together.

But that’s not how I usually write. At all. And you could probably tell from the short sentences and paragraphs that I didn’t write those articles myself.

No matter how much I tried to train AI to write like me, it couldn’t. I fed it every example of my writing I could find, from speeches to old blog posts to a couple of short stories. I spent so many hours talking back and forth with it, trying to teach it to write in my style and avoid all the AI tells the internet loves to point out. But it still produced shit writing.

When you tell AI you’re writing for Substack, it leans right into its own writing style and just loses all control to write a normal fucking paragraph.

Short sentences.

Lots of white space.

Neat points and arguments that have no life.

So it’s the exact opposite of what my style is. See what I did there?

I also genuinely enjoy thinking through ideas and writing. Sitting at my desk, music on, and just writing has always been a happy place for me. Sure, my body is nowhere near as young as it used to be, and I can no longer force myself to write faster than my natural pace without hurting my shoulder, which means I am slow as shit, but I do enjoy writing. It just takes forever, which, as a content creator trying to keep up with hustle culture, is painful.

After experimenting with a lot of AI-generated content and loving the convenience of having most of the work done for me in just a couple of sentence-long prompts, I chose to go back to writing the first drafts myself while quickly assembling my initial literature review for this newsletter.

I had almost an entire literature review prepared by AI. However, I still needed to read everything, check for accuracy, and truly understand the content because AI can still make mistakes. That’s when I realised that I would probably end up doing just as much work on the review as if I had just done it myself from the start.

What a fantastic time to decide to stop using AI to write! Having no fucking idea how I’m still upright, of course, I decide to return to hand typing everything now.

After getting a reasonable amount of work done in the five days after returning from State Titles, I woke up with a sharp pain in my stomach on Thursday.

That, unfortunately, meant I had to listen to my body for the first time in weeks, so I decided to have a bed day. I had my support worker cancel my appointment that afternoon, and I binge-watched Brooklyn Nine-Nine. For nine hours. Even though I only had two days before I had to have an article ready and scheduled.

That’s the reality of being a business owner with chronic illnesses and disability, unfortunately.

Even after feeling like death for the last few days, I still had an article to produce and publish, so I’ve had to keep going. My business doesn’t grow unless I have content out, so the algorithms like me, and my audience still maybe remembers me.

I’ve literally had to write a couple of hundred words and do all the editing on this article today before I could hit publish. Luckily, the weather was shit, so I had nothing better to do. Although I could have done with another day in bed, I can’t afford that luxury anymore.