How ChatGPT Helps Me Write and Connect Better

I’m not a writer. Like, not even close. I haven’t read a ton of fiction or exquisite writing (I hope to fix that), and I’ve never studied the craft. Writing and expressing myself in words is actually super hard for me. Every few paragraphs you see from me is hours of writing and rewriting.

Today, I want to share my new-ish writing process with you. This version of my blog is heavily supported by ChatGPT. Now, before you purists roll your eyes at the mention of AI in writing, let’s step back for a second. I’m not using it how you might think.

Writing is a tool. Like art or music, it’s a way to transfer your mental state, lived experiences or whatever else you want to say to someone else. But it’s super inefficient. Even the best writers can only capture a sliver of what they feel. Try putting a psychedelic experience into words—it’s IᗰρاşŞIBℓË. Writing always loses something in translation.

So isn’t it natural to use whatever tools we can to make that transfer more accurate?

The criticism of using AI for writing mainly comes from the inauthenticity angle, and there’s a lot of truth to that. Obviously, if you give a topic to ChatGPT and ask it to generate a piece and then put your name on it, the content will not only fail to represent your voice but will also come out flat as fuck. No seriously, try to get ChatGPT to generate an interesting piece—I dare you.

But that's just the most basic way of using it. You didn't think I used it like that, did you? It's pretty obvious my writing is mine. I think my tone and temperament translate in my writing, RIGHT??

I use it in a more nuanced way, and I’ll talk about it below, but even then, when I told about it to my friend Alec a few days ago, he was basically like man, I wanna read your raw stuff, not robot stuff. That stung. This criticism is kinda expected until I can clearly explain how I use AI, but even then, might it still be valid? idk, I’m not 100% sure, tbh. My friend Alec is a really really good writer, and I respect him a lot, so talking to him made me think for sure. I’d love to hear your thoughts too and so with this post, I aim to clarify how, in my head, what I do actually feels more "raw."

I approach using ChatGPT by focusing on one question: How can I improve the accuracy of what I'm trying to say? How can I convey my thoughts more effectively? It's not about writing a better piece or sounding smarter or more polished. It's about making sure that what I say aligns as closely as possible with what's inside. Both the content and the vibe.

I think it's a misconception that my unedited and unpolished writing represents the "raw" me. It's not the "raw" me because my writing skills heavily influence and limit it. If I'm not a painter and see a beautiful woman, and I try to paint her but end up with a stick figure, is that really how I see her? Is that truly the "raw" me? I think it's just a product of my painting abilities, or rather, the lack of them. If I had a tool to help me paint what I see more accurately, wouldn't that be more "raw" because it better matches my internal state?

For a piece of writing to truly resonate—to successfully convey not just the content but the vibes—it needs an emotional or cognitive friction, a unique take or an idea that makes the reader stop and think or feel. This is what sparks the writing in the first place. The resonance of writing comes from veering off this beaten path, deviating from the flat, mainstream understanding of things.

AI tools, though, do the opposite. They polish things, make them broadly digestible, and smooth out the edges (it's really hard if not impossible to get anything edgy out of AI). At the extreme end of this, they turn whatever seed you had in the first place into the most digestible mainstream framing. What you end up with is a flat piece that doesn’t create any kind of resonance. AI can deliver the ideas in their most generic form, but it misses the nuance. It informs but doesn’t connect. And connection is the whole point.

This is also why starting with an AI-generated draft doesn’t work. AI might produce a polished piece, but because it’s so flat, trying to reverse-engineer emotion and nuance into something that wasn’t designed to hold them feels forced and doesn’t click.

There’s an upside to its writing, though: clarity. AI is really good at polishing and making things more digestible.

And so, when I use ChatGPT, I always keep this dichotomy in mind. We’re partners in crime: I bring the nuance, edge and emotion, and AI helps me frame things in a more understandable way. My job while writing is to know when to lean into the nuance and when to follow the polished thread to keep everything clear and cohesive.

My writing starts messy—a stream-of-consciousness draft full of scratchy, repetitive ideas, angles and half-baked metaphors. Once I’ve got everything down, I organize it and bring in ChatGPT.

I give super specific instructions: keep my tone, my phrasing, my everything. I don’t just take whatever it spits out, because most of what it generates doesn’t really match my vibe, no matter how much I prompt it. I go back and forth, see what it comes up with, and occasionally pull out a phrase, a word here, or a sentence there that better translates what I’m trying to express. Ten, twenty iterations later, I’ve got this fusion of my framings with AI-polished bits.

Then I comb through it again, making sure every single word feels like something I’d actually say. It’s not fast or easy, but it works.

I say I use AI to get my writing as close as I can to what I have in mind, but the reality is that I don’t just use it as an editor. I have conversations with it about my piece, and sometimes it brings up ideas or angles I hadn’t considered. Maybe it points out a blind spot in my writing or highlights where I need to add more context. After hours of back and forth—clarifying my ideas, questioning my assumptions, exploring new angles, and filling gaps I didn’t even know were there—I come away not only with a better piece of writing but also with a changed, deeper understanding of the topic itself.

By the end, the “raw me” has evolved. Is the final piece what I initially wanted to say, or is it the new me that grew during the process? Probably both. Spend enough time with any idea, and it’s gonna change. That’s just how it works. Impermanence, baby!

Writing is inherently imperfect. I never feel like I’ve captured exactly what I want to say or how I want to say it. But at some point, around the 80/20 mark, I have to stop and call it done. Working on the same piece gets really annoying after a while. Like this one… it’s the 3rd day I’m working on it, and I’m so sick of it already ahah.

So, anyway… this hybrid approach is still evolving. It’s natural to take the “Black Mirror” angle with all the new tech and frame them as inorganic and disconnecting. I’m usually the one fighting for keeping things organic. But maybe, just maybe… there’s another angle to this. If we learn to use these tools the right way, they can help us amplify our authentic expression and allow people like me—and so many others—to say what we couldn’t before, share more, and connect better.