The modern world is changing the whole way we look at writing.

A post, an artwork, an essay — what once took hours, days, or even years to refine can now appear in seconds. A prompt. A tool. A machine.

Even today I’m experimenting. Instead of sitting at the keyboard, carefully crafting words, I’m simply dictating into an AI app called Wispr Flow. It doesn’t edit much, but it captures quickly. I can then drop that text into ChatGPT or another LLM and let it polish.

And because I’ve written so many posts over the past year and a half, there’s already a style to lean on — themes, rhythms, ideas. An LLM can look at a few of them and say: ah, this is how Sasha writes. That’s wild.

Of course, the haters will say: “That’s not real writing. That’s cheating.” And they’re not wrong — something is lost when we don’t engage directly with the medium.

Think about Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel. The book begins with him in Papua New Guinea, struck by how indigenous people could move through the jungle with impossible skill — reading smells, sounds, light. Skills honed over centuries.

Or take London cabbies before Google Maps. They memorized thousands of streets, trained for years, and their hippocampi (the brain’s memory center) literally grew larger. Then GPS came along and suddenly, anyone with a phone could drive a cab.

So what do we lose when we stop exercising those muscles? Presence. Sharpness. The opportunity to develop ourselves.

Writing is no different. When we outsource it, we lose the practice — the craftsmanship that only comes from wrestling with words.

But here’s the other side: not everything has to be craft. Sometimes expression itself is the goal. For me, that’s music. My time, my energy, my devotion goes to the sitar, to composing, to ensembles. Writing? Writing is expression. Exploration.

That’s why these tools are so compelling. They let me riff. They let me speak in flow — messy, raw — and still shape something worth sharing. They’re an editor on my shoulder, like Grammarly for a blog post. Like an engineer polishing a pop track.

Britney Spears doesn’t make music alone. She has a whole team: producers, engineers, choreographers. Presidents don’t write their own speeches. Founders don’t build their companies alone. Why should writing be different?

The myth of the solo creator hides the fact that almost everyone at the top has help. AI just makes that help more accessible.

Yes, I risk losing something — a nuance, a phrase that wasn’t quite what I meant. But I also gain something: more freedom to explore, to express, to share. I can speak loosely, then refine. I can focus on the ideas rather than the friction of the craft.

And maybe that’s the meeting point. Awareness. Knowing that we gain and we lose. Knowing that the tools change us, but also give us new possibilities.

Our ancestors didn’t sit at desks. They hunted, farmed, roamed. Modern life took that away — so we built gyms. Maybe AI takes away some of the exercise of writing. Maybe we’ll find new ways to replace that too.

For me, it’s fun. It’s liberating. I get to explore multimodality: speaking, writing, art, music. All different ways of transmuting data — reshaping it, remixing it, expressing it.

So is it authentic? Is it cheating? Maybe. But authenticity isn’t about doing everything the hardest way possible. Authenticity is about having something to say.

And I do.

So I’ll keep experimenting. I’ll keep writing like this. And I invite you, too: let go of the perfectionism, the overthinking, the “this isn’t the right way.”

Explore. Try it. Share it. See what happens.

That’s the whole point.