against AI?

Paul Kingsnorth’s Writers Against AI campaign asks writers to make the following three pledges:

I will not use AI in my work as a writer.

I will not support writers who use AI in their work.

I will support writers, illustrators, editors and others in related fields whose work is entirely human-made.

I think I qualify on the first count? But it depends on what is meant by “my work as a writer.”

I use Claude several times a week, for various things. In some recent and wholly representative queries, I asked for

a basic Alfredo sauce recipe

a limoncello recipe

a guide to the Chicago Cubs 2026 roster, minor league prospects, and likelihood of success

an explanation of the Newark airport’s bad reputation

guidance for travel from Newark to midtown Manhattan

No problems there. But I think I may run afoul of Kingsnorth’s strictures in one significant way.

My chief means of brainstorming is to dictate thoughts into my Sony voice recorder. I have written (with Claude’s help!) a script that converts those .mp3 files into Apple’s preferred .m4a and uploads them to the Voice Memos app. That app automatically produces a transcript, which I then copy and paste into Claude with the following prompt:

I’m about to paste in a chunk of text. Please punctuate it and eliminate repetitions and filled pauses, but otherwise leave the text unchanged.

I do this on a fairly regular basis, and while I think that my “leave the text unchanged” order means that I comply with the spirit of Writers Against AI, I am not meeting the criteria demanded by the letter.

I’m okay with that.

Here’s another way in which I may not meet the pledge. I have no interest in writing a “personal” journal, but on the first day of every month I create a new text-file journal of ideas. Then at the end of each year I concatenate the monthly entries into a single file. I uploaded the 2020-2025 journals to Claude and asked for an analysis of the key themes, and asked especially for identification of the ideas that never bore obvious fruit. The results have been very interesting and very helpful.

For one thing, I learned — which of course I could have found out easily on my own — that in those six years I wrote 312,818 words in the journals. (Almost nothing! This blog contains roughly 2,200,000 words.)

Second, I learned that my kvetching about whether to keep using an iPad or not is “the most durable theme in all six journals. Explicitly self-condemned as ‘pointless’ since 2021. Present in every single year, including December 2025.”

But maybe the most interesting thing is this:

The theology of culture based on Ruskin’s Seven Lamps of Architecture has been flagged more times, more explicitly, and with more urgency than any other unwritten piece in the entire six-year corpus. Every time it surfaces, it is called something he “really should write.” It has never been written.

The Seven Lamps as a theology of culture would unite almost everything else in this analysis: the pre-evangelism / awakening affections project, the defense of beauty, the broken-world theology, the rehumanization argument, and his sustained engagement with Ruskin as one of the writers who refused to separate theology from aesthetics, ethics from economics. It is not incidental that this is the most flagged unwritten piece.

That’s … useful to know. But the reason I haven’t written this book is simple: I am the only person in the entire world who would be interested in it.