I enjoyed reading this Michael and as a neurodiverse person too with a good part of my life in academia transitioning from idea to text would take me weeks of refining - whilst I watched peers conduct the transition in days, or hours.
I've noticed a similar process developing in my writing too. Exposure to new grammatical forms and combination of ideas. At the heart of it I decide ultimately, how the language is constructed, however AI help fold out some of my ideas!
Thanks for the comment. I am still using pretty much exactly the same workflow although I have to admit that the latest versions of Gemini have a really good writing style for my type of content. It has become a viable option to stay completely within the Google ecosystem.
Great piece. Thanks for sharing your process and that’s a lot of back and forth between tools!
It sounds like your workflow is working but I’m wondering if you’ve explored trying to use Gemini ‘gems’ - inputting the writing guardrails you have to instruct the model how it should operate along with incorporating your research within a notebook from Notebook LM may allow for a one stop shop. Just some food for thought.
This is a powerful reflection on AI as an amplifier, not a replacement. Your process shows that judgment, creativity, and human discernment remain central, AI simply expands what you can achieve with them.
I talk about the latest AI trends and insights. If you’re interested in how AI acts as an amplifier for human judgment, creativity, and decision-making, check out my Substack. I’m sure you’ll find it very relevant and relatable.
I am amazed and thankful for your post. I have been using a similar process. I had also written a lot. Two books, over 90 articles. My writing was reasonably decent but I know writers. My mom is a writer. I was not a writer. AI assisted writing has liberated me, almost identical to the way it’s done it for you. I can go from idea to essay much more easily. Again it’s so interesting to find someone else with a similar experience.
Thanks for sharing! I think it is important that these individual processes are made visible. I currently see a lot of gatekeeping and blanket refusal of anything AI. This is not helpful as it drives every legitimate use of AI underground.
Really useful description of your process, and quite inspiring (although also left me feeling exhausted!) Lots of parallels here with my own approach to AI assisted writing, although interestingly having co-authored an AI-assisted book (for very intentional reasons) I find myself valuing my own craft of writing more and more. And so it's doubly interesting that this human craft aspect also comes through in your approach
Thanks! This is still a time consuming process. But for me it speeds up creating a text considerably. I went from being able to create about 1k words a day to about 10k.
I’m so grateful for you taking the time to spell out your process in such detail. This is so close to how I work with AI, and it’s affirming to share that experience with another writer.
Your piece resonates strongly because the workflow is recognizable — the recipe approach, the multi-model loop, the insistence that the output couldn't exist without both parties. That last point is the most honest and interesting claim in the whole AI-writing debate, and you make it well.
What strikes me about your particular use case is how clean it is. The AI is filling a genuine capability gap. You have the ideas, the frameworks, the judgment — the sentence-building is where the friction lives. That's a more defensible and frankly more interesting story than most AI-writing discourse allows for, which tends to flatten everything into either "you cheated" or "AI did it."
Where I'd sit differently is on the voice question. You say you're comfortable with "your voice" being partly constructed by the toolchain because you're a science communicator rather than a literary writer, and that distinction makes sense for your goals. But I think it's worth pushing on slightly — not as a criticism, but because your process is actually more authorial than you're giving yourself credit for. The choices about what to emphasize, which arguments to develop, what to cut from the conclusion — that is voice, maybe more than the cadence of individual sentences.
The thing your piece captures that most writing-about-AI-writing misses is that genuine collaboration requires both parties to contribute something the other can't. You're not using AI to avoid thinking. You're using it to think more, and write what you'd otherwise be unable to get out. That's a meaningfully different relationship with the tool than what the standard anxiety narrative imagines.
Thanks for the kind words! My self worth is not defined by being an author, which is why it allows me to leave the authorial question open. This helps me bring my points across to people who might be threatened by AI. So, in some sense, my position about authorship is more a pragmatic one.
I enjoyed reading this Michael and as a neurodiverse person too with a good part of my life in academia transitioning from idea to text would take me weeks of refining - whilst I watched peers conduct the transition in days, or hours.
I've noticed a similar process developing in my writing too. Exposure to new grammatical forms and combination of ideas. At the heart of it I decide ultimately, how the language is constructed, however AI help fold out some of my ideas!
I'll be trying out some of your process.
Thanks for the comment. I am still using pretty much exactly the same workflow although I have to admit that the latest versions of Gemini have a really good writing style for my type of content. It has become a viable option to stay completely within the Google ecosystem.
Great piece. Thanks for sharing your process and that’s a lot of back and forth between tools!
It sounds like your workflow is working but I’m wondering if you’ve explored trying to use Gemini ‘gems’ - inputting the writing guardrails you have to instruct the model how it should operate along with incorporating your research within a notebook from Notebook LM may allow for a one stop shop. Just some food for thought.
Thanks for the comment and suggestion. I have not yet used gems. I prefer engaging multiple LLMs in my process. But I’ll have a look. 👍
This is a powerful reflection on AI as an amplifier, not a replacement. Your process shows that judgment, creativity, and human discernment remain central, AI simply expands what you can achieve with them.
I talk about the latest AI trends and insights. If you’re interested in how AI acts as an amplifier for human judgment, creativity, and decision-making, check out my Substack. I’m sure you’ll find it very relevant and relatable.
I am amazed and thankful for your post. I have been using a similar process. I had also written a lot. Two books, over 90 articles. My writing was reasonably decent but I know writers. My mom is a writer. I was not a writer. AI assisted writing has liberated me, almost identical to the way it’s done it for you. I can go from idea to essay much more easily. Again it’s so interesting to find someone else with a similar experience.
Thanks for sharing! I think it is important that these individual processes are made visible. I currently see a lot of gatekeeping and blanket refusal of anything AI. This is not helpful as it drives every legitimate use of AI underground.
Really useful description of your process, and quite inspiring (although also left me feeling exhausted!) Lots of parallels here with my own approach to AI assisted writing, although interestingly having co-authored an AI-assisted book (for very intentional reasons) I find myself valuing my own craft of writing more and more. And so it's doubly interesting that this human craft aspect also comes through in your approach
Thanks! This is still a time consuming process. But for me it speeds up creating a text considerably. I went from being able to create about 1k words a day to about 10k.
I’m so grateful for you taking the time to spell out your process in such detail. This is so close to how I work with AI, and it’s affirming to share that experience with another writer.
Thanks! Yes, I would guess that quite a few people will converge to a process similar to this one.
Thanks Michael, very insightful, This one I like very much due to its genuine approach. Please Keep up posting :XX
Thanks! 🙏
Your piece resonates strongly because the workflow is recognizable — the recipe approach, the multi-model loop, the insistence that the output couldn't exist without both parties. That last point is the most honest and interesting claim in the whole AI-writing debate, and you make it well.
What strikes me about your particular use case is how clean it is. The AI is filling a genuine capability gap. You have the ideas, the frameworks, the judgment — the sentence-building is where the friction lives. That's a more defensible and frankly more interesting story than most AI-writing discourse allows for, which tends to flatten everything into either "you cheated" or "AI did it."
Where I'd sit differently is on the voice question. You say you're comfortable with "your voice" being partly constructed by the toolchain because you're a science communicator rather than a literary writer, and that distinction makes sense for your goals. But I think it's worth pushing on slightly — not as a criticism, but because your process is actually more authorial than you're giving yourself credit for. The choices about what to emphasize, which arguments to develop, what to cut from the conclusion — that is voice, maybe more than the cadence of individual sentences.
The thing your piece captures that most writing-about-AI-writing misses is that genuine collaboration requires both parties to contribute something the other can't. You're not using AI to avoid thinking. You're using it to think more, and write what you'd otherwise be unable to get out. That's a meaningfully different relationship with the tool than what the standard anxiety narrative imagines.
Thanks for the kind words! My self worth is not defined by being an author, which is why it allows me to leave the authorial question open. This helps me bring my points across to people who might be threatened by AI. So, in some sense, my position about authorship is more a pragmatic one.