The Story Letter's AI Policy
This is an important thing to say out loud.
Just popping in to share The Story Letter’s AI policy.
I never used ChatGPT (the voices skeeve me out), but right when Claude came out, I chatted with it quite a bit. I gave it explicit instructions not to “write for me,” but I used it to test out ideas, assess my outlines, and clean up transcripts. I asked it to help me manage my anxiety around my Audible launch. I asked it to write some Facebook posts for me since I really did not want to. And (I’ll be totally honest) sometimes I asked it to reassure me that I made sense.
(There is an essay in there somewhere, about being afraid to ask for help from your friends, and instead seeking a robot’s reassurance, in the context of the isolation of the current age.)
Then I learned about the water usage, the author lawsuits, the piracy, the layoffs. So - as an old coach of mine used to say: once I knew better, I could do better.
I have since set a personal policy that I do not use AI to help me write. Telling stories about our own lives is the most human thing we can do, and I’ll be a human when I talk about it.
So there might be some AI residue in older posts - I’m not going to delete them or rewrite them completely - but for the last while, and then moving forward, this Substack is organic.
Thank you!
XO
Micaela
