Last night I chose to read an AI generated novel over a novel by a human author that I’m a fan of. That’s part of the reason why moving forward, I’m going to focus more on presence than on text.
Before we get into that … I shouldn’t need to say this but in the world we live in, I need to say this:
I am the human named CD Damitio and I am writing this without any AI assistance.
I can only say it, I can’t make you believe me. There are plenty of AI written things out there pretending to be written by writers.
I’ve done a lot of writing with AI. When it comes to books, I have always been explicit when I use AI. I wrote the first published novel cowritten with AI and I gave the AI credit on the cover. I’ve developed a system of AI book writing in which I credit myself as the director because the AI is the author. Every book I wrote before 2023 was written by me (except for Blue Eyed Bastards – the one I cowrote with an early LLM).
Since then, I’ve written several with no AI (Aisha and the Pearl Path, Autobiography of a Bao Ji, Kitsune No Haru, The Ghosts of Intimacy, Future World 2323) and directed AI to write a bunch of others. My substack (Indignified.substack.com) began with me writing a prompt. I wrote a story from the prompt and then I had all of the major LLMs use the same prompt to write the story. That was in April of 2025.
Seventeen months later, the progress that AI has made in its ability to write well is nothing less than mind blowing. Every day, it becomes faster at getting better. Over the last week, I used Claude Fable 5 to write three novels. I’m a prolific writer and storyteller but I could never do that. And Claude actually couldn’t have done it as well as it did without the help of something I built. I built an archive at w3wu to keep track of all the characters, worlds, stories, and lore that I’ve built. I gave Claude access to it and directed the novels. So, the novels contain ideas, characters, plot points, and more from worlds that I’ve built. I haven’t read them yet. I’m on chapter six of the first one – and – frankly. I’m blown away.
Is it the writing, the plot and story, or the way that so much that came from me is woven into it without me ever really being a part of it. I don’t know. I wonder if the line between human written and AI written will ever blur so much that no one (not even an AI) will be able to tell the difference.
I’m pretty sure I can still tell. Even the most advanced AIs still have some pretty dramatic tells, especially when it comes to longer form writing. When I am reading this new novel that I’ve directed AI to write Scrollbound, I can tell that it was written by AI because of things like the way it uses Tuesday or the number eleven – but here’s the thing. I’m not sure it matters. The bigger thing is that even knowing it was written by AI, I am enjoying it.
And I think that’s where we are heading. To the point where it doesn’t matter if it was written by AI or human. The content is going to be what matters.
I made a very conscious choice with the most recent book I wrote. The book is my own autobiography and I decided to not let AI anywhere near it until I had written the whole thing and done two revision passes on it. I didn’t ask it for research advice, I didn’t run the manuscript through AI for suggestions, I didn’t use AI to plan it or outline it. I wanted the book about my life to be completely and totally by me. I took the idea so seriously that instead of asking the AI to go through and fix spelling and grammar, I made a copy of the file and asked it to highlight spelling and grammar changes it thought it needed. Then I went through my original and the highlighted one, side by side. I made some of the changes, but there were a lot that I didn’t. Things that were more about how words flow from me or how I use punctuation or even how I intentionally misspell some words (vagobond is one example).
Only when that was done did I make another copy and have the AI format that into ebook and paperback formats. My original is still there, untouched by AI. I saved copies of the drafts as PDFs as I went. I don’t know why I feel that provenance is important, but I do.
I do something similar with my weekly column on my substack ‘Letters from Exile’. I draft on substack and then I revise it. All without AI. Then I publish it. AI never touches it. Those are letters from me, not from an AI. I say so explicitly at the bottom of each one. Written by a human called CD without AI. Again, there are plenty of people who make that claim but are lying about it. You’ll just have to believe me.
So far, the Pangram AI checker has backed up my claim, but it’s just a matter of time until I use one too many em-dashes or write a column without human errors and then I will likely get a notification that says it was AI assisted.
And that brings me to something else. With my autobiography written, I am mostly done writing about my life or experiences. I’ve spent three decades sharing my life. I’ve shared my travels, my relationships, my discontents, my experiences in life. I’ll finish out my Letters from Exile in 2026 and then we’ll see. I’ll likely use AI to put them into a book format. I’ll publish it and it probably won’t sell any copies, and that’s fine. It’s more about the record of it than about sales. That’s been the case all along.
The blog posts on this site have been an interesting experiment in a middle path. This year, while I traveled, I would do like I always do, make note of interesting things I discovered or encountered along the way. Previously, I might have made a small blog post, mentioned them in passing, or just had a journal note about them – but this year, I used AI to write informational articles about them. I have really enjoyed this method. It’s two things – it’s me researching something I found interesting and it’s me sharing the output from that without investing too much of my own time and energy into something that people may not ever even read.
I also created two series of articles (using AI) about things I got a lot of questions about 1) AI novel writing and 2) buying an old house in Japan and turning it into my home. I didn’t really want to write those articles, so it was great to be able to put together the topics, then hand it off to AI to research, write, post and share. The quality of those articles – which were written five months ago by AI is now so far below the quality of what AI can write that it’s like they are cassette tapes from the 1980s. Still useful, but old tech.
I am mostly done writing. I’ll keep directing AI to do the kind of blog posts I’ve done here over the past few months, I’ll probably direct more novels and books, and I’ll probably keep writing some form of human writing that I tag as such – but I think it’s time to move on. Most people don’t read except off a feed and the difference between human and AI writing is becoming indistinguishable.
I’m going to start talking more. I’m going to start putting my face in front of a camera more. I’m going to start saying more and writing less. I’ll utilize my substack and distribute it to YouTube and maybe even put clips on Tik-tok. I’m going to start appearing on other people’s podcasts, talking about some of these ideas that I’ve been writing about for years. Things like the thing that can fill the vacant religion hole or the importance of data-sovereignty.
I can feel big changes unfolding in my life and how I live it. This comes from learning how to pay attention. I’ve never liked to pay to live, but paying attention to live is something altogether different. It’s that shift in attention that has helped me to realize I want to put a lot more focus on two things I refuse to monetize.
Baoism is my answer to what fills the religion hole instead of filling it with dopamine from a profit hungry tech company. I will never use it to make money, in fact, it costs me money. I put resources into it with no desire to harvest resources out of it. Xcrol is the same, I pay to keep it going because I think it is important. There needs to be a place where humans can connect without being turned into the product. I built it with a couple of goals in mind – first, no extraction from users. Second, it needed to have a real life human interaction component built in. A way for humans to safely get to know each other, to interact, and to commune with one another.
So I built two things I don’t want to make money from but which cost me money. Kind of stupid, right?
It took me a while to realize why this could work. I’ve created a bunch of other stuff that I feel fine to make money from. I’ve written and published more than thirty books. I’ve created the amazing things that are W3WU.com, MicroVictoryArmy, aVeryGoodNovel, etc. If Baoism and Xcrol can bring value to people, they will naturally also bring value and attention to all the other stuff I have created. That’s where the money has to come from. I put together a diagram of it on the Indignified Labs page – it works and I feel good about it.
I make money to support myself and my family from my other projects. My autobiography and all of my other work (excluding Baoism and Xcrol) are literally me trading my life and experiences for money. I can feel good about that transaction. As for Baoism and Xcrol, they are what I am giving to the world without asking anything in return and I feel good about that transaction too.
So, I’ve written enough. I’m an author and developer – that won’t change. Now I become a marketer and promoter, a talking head, a face and a voice.
I’ll just need to compete with all the AI that are becoming the same things.