I loathe "ice-breakers."

Truly, nothing makes me want to disappear more than being in a new group or on a Zoom call and the facilitator breaks the ice by asking questions like, "What's a fun fact about you that no one else knows?"

I've been married for ten years. Why would I tell a group of strangers an unknown fact about myself that my spouse doesn't even know?

Nope, I'm good, thank you!

I think a more interesting question to open up conversation is, "What is your version of purgatory?"

So, not what you envision Hell—the worst of the worst kind of afterlife—but like a pet peeve that if you were to experience it everyday, you'd know you're in purgatory.

My answer typically changes every so often, but lately, it's been depressingly the same for months: Having to ask, "Is this AI?" every time I look at something on the internet.

That's why I'm here now, to talk about my writing process and share my stance on Artificial Intelligence. That way, you can read anything on Through the Mythic Glass, and don't want to ask that dreaded question of "Is this AI?"

My Writing Process

If it's not abundantly clear by now, I'm a huge nerd.

I love furthering my education and falling into study rabbit holes. So much so, that even though I'm not able to attend university again, I never want the homework to end. Isn't that why writers start blogs and Substacks? Never ending homework???

It's not just the writing assignments that I continue as an adult, but the studying with both books and lecture series.

I'm an avid note taker, so in both the books I read, and the courses I watch (typically from the Great Courses (this is not an affiliate link, though I LOVE Great Courses very much)), I've taken hundreds of notes, and from those notes is how I construct outlines for my essays.

A quick sojourn into my note taking system

A while back, I shared a video of what my linked notes look like inside my note taking software, Obsidian. (It's incomplete, because, of course, my note taking never ends!)

Before I switched to Obsidian, the previous note-taking software I used for years was Notion. But, as you can tell by looking at their website, they lean heavily into selling artificial intelligence as part of their service. I ignored it as long as I could, but eventually, everywhere you looked inside of the software, AI was there.

So, I switched to Obsidian (again, not an affiliate link, but I absolutely recommend it if you take a lot of notes), a free Markdown file note-taking platform where I can store my notes directly on my computer with no artificial intelligence involved.

Beginning the outlining process

With my all my notes in hand (or rather, saved on my computer and linked in Obsidian), I set to work on an outline for an article. Usually, this happens when I get inspired by an idea, or look through my web of notes to see what topic I haven't written about yet.

In Obsidian, I'll link any notes that are relevant to the topic, then organize them into sub-ideas that might work as sections. Once I'm done with all that, I usually have a pretty sturdy outline that I'm happy with.

From that point, I previously wrote the entire first draft of the article in Obsidian by filling out the bullet points in the outline. But now, I write my long-form content in a different writing software system.

Grammar and Spellcheck

Before switching to my new writing software, I would draft in Obsidian and then copy and paste into a spell check platform to check for spelling (obviously), grammar and syntax errors.

For years, this has been Grammarly. But like Notion, the company has been heavily focusing on integrating artificial intelligence into its software, even in extremely unsavory ways.

For me, after a while of using Grammarly, I felt like it was trying to flatten my writing into something boring and palatable (even on a sentence level). Nearly every sentence I wrote, it wanted me to change it into something indistinguishable from anyone else. Grammarly does not like personality.

I knew it was time to give up Grammarly. When I first got it years ago, it felt like a place that loved writers, but now it seems like a place to be able to write perfectly nice corporate emails.

Finishing the Draft

With this essay you're reading now, I've written it on a new platform called Ellipsus (again, not an affiliate link, though, I'm really liking the platform so far!)

In my two monitors, I have Obsidian pulled up on one, and Ellipsus pulled up on the other, and I flesh out my rough ideas in Ellipsus and edit until I have a finished essay! From there, I copy and paste the essay from Ellipsus into the place I will publish it, either my Substack or Offprint page.

Showing the human touch in my essays going forward

The reason for switching to a different long-form text editor was two-fold:

1. I wanted a platform that catered to writers and was good for long form content.

2. I wanted a way to prove that I wrote my pieces and that they were not generated with artificial intelligence.

The problem with AI software detecting AI "writing"

Grammarly actually has an option to share an "authorship" report, but I have similar gripes about it as I do with Substack's attempt to detect "AI writing" with their partner, Pangram:

1. Both use artificial intelligence to detect AI. (I don't want to use artificial intelligence to detect artificial intelligence, because it seems like a bad loop to get sucked into.)

2. Both programs flagged a sentence I wrote as AI, even though I know it wasn't (after all, I wrote the damn thing!)

I appreciate what Substack is trying to do by integrating Pangram into the service: letting readers feel empowered to know if what they're reading is written by a human or generated with artificial intelligence.

However, between the false positives, and the breakneck speed of AI's evolution, I seriously doubt that any AI detection platform can keep up. Not to mention, the more and more that people use artificial intelligence, the more they pick up the style of how AI "writes," and then the more humans begin to write like AI, then the more false positives happen.

My solution to proving the human touch

So, instead of using something like Pangram to "prove" my writing is actually written by me, in each essay I publish going forward, I'll link my Ellipsus draft that will show the "writing journey" of each piece. (Most likely, I'll have it linked somewhere toward the top or the bottom of the essay, but you can check out this essay's writing journey here.)

This process is what the software calls "embossing" where users can choose to share the "writing journey" of a piece. This is where readers can see things like how long a piece took to write, "thinking pauses," and edit analytics.

You can see an example below in this screenshot:

(I took this screenshot in the middle of drafting this essay; the final one will look different when you click the link above!)

My Stance on Artificial Intelligence

As you can probably already tell, I don't use artificial intelligence in my writing at all. Frankly, I almost never use it in general. (The last time I used it was when I set up my Obsidian vault and needed help with creating CSS so I could style it the way I want to… let's just say that any sort of coding is not for me.) The only reason I can see myself using artificial intelligence going forward is if I need to write code—and considering how infrequently I need to code—I'd say maybe once a year at most.

I also won't come out and say that every instance of artificial intelligence is bad or inherently evil. I'm sure there are instances where it's useful and a force for good, like in data analysis or as a useful tool in a spreadsheet.

But there's a huge difference between using artificial intelligence in this manner versus using it to generate content and "writers" passing off AI "written" content as their own (this extends to any art medium, too: visual art, music, etc.).

Not to mention the harm chat bots and generative AI are having on society, like chat bots creating "cognitive atrophy" in users, or its negative impacts on students and how its cutting out the one thing that students are in school to do: learn.

This is by no means an exhaustive list of the dangers and pitfalls of GenAI and chat bots, but if you'd like to read further into this topic, I highly recommend the book "Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman's OpenAI" by Karen Hao.

Gen AI and chat bots do not have an ethical place in art creation

When it comes to writing or art in general, I don't think that artificial intelligence (especially Generative AI) has an ethical place in it. Generative AI is made possible by stealing the work of millions and by depleting local communities of their resources (electricity, water, etc.)

Besides the ethical reasons I choose not to use artificial intelligence, I don't use it because when I did so once, it flattened my writing into something I didn't recognize (in a more extreme way than what Grammarly was doing to my sentences.).

In 2025, out of curiosity, I ran an article I wrote into ChatGPT to see what it "thought" and what it gave back was something that made me feel as though I were looking at myself and my writing through a fun house mirror—vaguely recognizable, but so smoothed out that it was creepy, as though I were looking at an android replica of myself with all the rough bits and undesirable aspects of my humanity smoothed away.

Going forward…

I'm sure as artificial intelligence continues to change and adapt at breakneck speed, I'll need to come back to this article and update it.

Though, unless something dramatically changes within AI companies, or how artificial intelligence works in general, I don't see my stance changing much.

Honestly, the more and more that comes out about artificial intelligence (particularly chat bots and generative AI) and its effects on society and the world as a whole, the more and more it makes me sick to my stomach and I want nothing to do with it. (The next time I want CSS for my Obsidian vault to make it look pretty, I'll just have to figure it out myself or deal with a part of it that could look prettier!)

If you have any questions about my writing process that I didn't detail here, please feel free to leave a comment and I'd be happy to go into it further!

Until then, cheers to human-made efforts and art,

Monica