I’m not much of a humanist. I don’t feel warm and fuzzy about human beings as a species. Other than my cherished inner circle of homo sapiens (emphasis on the homo), I tend to prefer the company of dogs and pigeons.
I don’t hate machines. I’m the kind of feminist who would rather be a cyborg than a goddess.
I’m not a technophobe. I’m a Luddite in the historical sense of the term. A worker who is enraged at losing much of her livelihood to a clunky machine enabled by lazy people. A professional translator whose income has been stolen by linguistic imperialists who want to be able to read everything and everyone in English, but prefer the convenience of large language models over paying a living wage to human translators.
I’m a writer whose work is the fruit of a lifetime of engagement with the ideas, actions and writing of other human beings, and does not have the time or money to waste trying to determine which people who call themselves writers actually are, and which ones are con-artists who exist by stealing the work of others – including my own.
There may be areas (medicine, for example) where artificial intelligence can be used in careful and ethical ways to enhance human and other-than-human life. But scientists who use AI do so openly. In contrast, in the publishing world – including here on Substack – generative AI (aka ChatGPT and the like) is increasingly being used furtively in order to generate maximum views and income for the producer, with no creative or intellectual value for readers.
This newsletter exists so I can explore the links between writing, activism and solidarity. Generative AI is the opposite of all these things. I have not used it, and will not use it, to “research”, “write” or “edit” anything I publish, in this newsletter or anywhere else.
Following the example of the English writer Sarah Hall, I hereby declare that this newsletter is human written.
And in the name of solidarity: thank you and respect to all those writers – so many of them women – who have been doing the hard human labour of researching the real-life harms of generative AI, committing to keeping their work AI free, and constructing strong arguments about why producing text with AI is not writing.
And to all the other writers who value human creativity, believe people should be paid a living wage for our work, and love our fellow sentient creatures and the planet more than profit and productivity: Happy New Year. I look forward to reading and learning from your writing in 2026.
For anyone else: if you’re committing what Hall fittingly calls creative larceny, come clean about it. Declare openly on every text you publish how you are using AI to produce the work you claim as your own.
And stop calling yourself a writer.
Image Credit: Lake Winnipeg at sundown. Photo by author.
Pen in Fist is written by me, Carrie Lou Hamilton. You can find my other writing and projects here. If you like what you read, please leave me a tip.
This newsletter is human written. No generative artificial intelligence tools have been used for the research, writing or editing of this post.
Thanks for reading.