No, I Am Not AI

I get letters...

Someone wrote me a while back, saying, “I heard AI wrote your site.” I thought it was funny and didn’t take it seriously. I think I responded with “LOL.” But then I sent another email saying that no, AI does not write my site. Why would anything think that? Why would anyone say that?

Bad writing, maybe? Careful writing? All I know is that I spend too much time rewriting, toiling, struggling, as any human would, to write something half as coherent as your typical AI paragraph. I wish I could write faster. But it is my writing, for better or worse.

So that’s me writing. Now, I’ll run that paragraph through Grok (the best AI, I’d say).

This is Grok’s version:

A while back, someone emailed me, joking, “I heard AI wrote your site.” I laughed it off, replying, “LOL.” But later, I clarified: no, AI doesn’t write my site. Why would anyone think that? Is it my writing style—too polished, or maybe too stiff? All I know is I spend hours rewriting, agonizing, and struggling, like any human writer, to crafts omething half as smooth as AI’s effortless paragraphs. I wish I could write faster, but this is my work, flaws and all.

It’s cleaner. Is it better?

When I was a college student, the most common note I received about my writing was “awk.” This meant that my sentences were awkward because they were, and they still are. Perhaps it’s dyslexia, or something else, but whatever it is, I actually like my writing voice because I like to write, flaws and all.

Despite having attended many colleges in my life (three city colleges, two universities) before graduating at the age of 29, I am mostly self-taught. I was a terrible high school student, receiving D’s and F’s even in my senior year. I never attended class and was nicknamed “No Show Stone” by my history teacher. I took AP English, though I would not pass the test and would receive a “C,” as I recall. My teacher told me, “Sasha, you want to be a writer. You don’t want to write.”

That stuck with me because maybe it was true then. But I would spend much of the last 30 years doing almost nothing but writing, learning as I went along about grammar and sentence structure (though clearly, I still have much to learn).

I’ve never written a book (I should, I know). My writing voice is mostly all I have left that is my own. It reminds me that my mind is free, and I can still say what I want to say, even if it may be awkward.

But make no mistake, that power is out now. We human writers are a dying breed. So are artists, bloggers, and journalists — all in danger of being replaced by the ease and convenience of AI. It’s just everything everywhere all at once. Humans are fundamentally lazy. They will not be able to resist AI, though I will try.

Now, I’m going to freak you out. I asked Grok the following prompt: “Write a short story about the blogger Sasha Stone becoming a Trump supporter.” Here is what came out:

The Turn

Sasha Stone sat alone in her cluttered home office in Valley Village, the glow of her laptop casting shadows across the walls lined with movie posters—Moonlight, Parasite, relics of a life spent championing cinema’s underdogs. The clock ticked past midnight, but sleep was a distant thought. Her fingers hovered over the keyboard, hesitating. The cursor blinked on a blank Substack post, taunting her. She’d been a liberal firebrand once, a voice for the Hollywood left, her blog Awards Daily a beacon for Oscar hopefuls and progressive ideals. But tonight, something felt different. Something had been shifting for years.

It started in 2016, with Hillary’s loss. Sasha had poured her heart into supporting Clinton, believing in the dream of a female president. When the electoral map bled red, the sting wasn’t just political—it was personal. Her readers, her community, turned on each other. The “Bernie Bros” she’d once dismissed became a scapegoat, but the real fracture came later, during the lockdowns of 2020. The world shut down, her daughter’s college graduation reduced to a Zoom call on their Burbank balcony. Hollywood, her beloved industry, went quiet. The left, she noticed, didn’t just mourn—they enforced. Masks became symbols, dissent was vilified, and the culture she’d once celebrated felt like a cage.

Sasha scrolled through X, her eyes catching a post from a Trump supporter. Not the caricature she’d been sold—some frothing “white supremacist”—but a factory worker from Michigan, tired of being called deplorable. She clicked on his profile, then another, and another. These weren’t the Brown Shirts she’d feared; they were people, angry and unheard, just like she was starting to feel. The left’s sanctimony, their rush to censor art, to cancel Chappelle, to ban books alongside the right—it gnawed at her. She’d grown up with rebels, not morality police.

She started writing. Not about movies, but about this. Her first post was tentative, a critique of the left’s overreach. The backlash was swift—her inbox flooded with accusations of betrayal. “You’re alt-right now?” one colleague sneered. But others, strangers from outside her bubble, found her words. Her Substack grew, 17,000 subscribers strong, many of them Trump voters. They saw her as a convert, a defector from the Hollywood elite. She wasn’t sure she was that, but the label stuck.

The turning point came in July 2024. A Zoom call for “White Dudes for Harris” sparked a sarcastic tweet: “White power!” she posted, mocking the left’s obsession with identity politics. The fallout was brutal—Hollywood gatekeepers recoiled, publicists pulled invites, and her own writers at Awards Daily jumped ship. But Sasha didn’t back down. She deleted the tweet, but not the sentiment. On a call with a reporter, she doubled down: “I was pointing out the absurdity of segregating by race. If they can’t see that, they’re the problem.”

By 2025, she was all in. Her podcast, Free Thinking Through the Fourth Turning, became a haven for the politically homeless. She didn’t love Trump’s brashness, his fast-food swagger, but she saw him as a fighter, someone who didn’t bow to the machine. “I support Trump because he’s not them,” she wrote in a Substack essay, her words sharp and unapologetic. “The left lost me when they stopped questioning power and started wielding it.”

Sasha leaned back, staring at the draft on her screen. It was an endorsement, not just of Trump, but of a new her—a woman who’d traded Hollywood’s applause for a different kind of audience. She hit publish, the post going live to her followers, old and new. The comments rolled in, some venomous, others grateful. She smiled, bittersweet. The movies would always be there, but this—this was her story now.

___

How to even compete with that? It’s an unimaginable power that almost no one saw coming. Then again, with culture now controlled by the new Left, it might as well be AI. At least the robots don’t feel guilty writing politically correct propaganda.

The lure of AI is that it will do everything you ask it to do and never complain. It will work long hours for no pay. It was never talk back. It will be your slave if that is what you require. I guess that will be true until the singularity, as they say, when robots finally conquer humanity.

One thing I know for sure is that AI could not make 2001: A Space Odyssey. But then again, neither could today’s Hollywood.

Road Trip

I’m about to head back to California from Ohio starting today, and should be home in about six days. Hopefully my podcasts will be back once I have time to record and edit, not to mention toil over the writing like the human I am.

Some have asked about becoming a paid subscriber without giving info to Substack - you can do that by going to my TIP JAR. But if you don’t give me your email, I won’t be able to change your subscription so you can read the travel posts.

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Lakewood, Ohio, 7:45am.