I Let AI Write My First Drafts

Somebody asked me recently who writes the articles on this site. The honest answer: an AI writes the first draft, and I finish them. Or at least that is the design. This essay is about what I learned letting a machine take the first pass, what worked, what failed, and the rule that keeps it honest.

I run several automated publishing workflows. News posts go out on a schedule. Articles appear here regularly. The drafts arrive in minutes. A human could not keep that pace by writing from a blank page every time. So I let the machine do the easy part first.

The setup

The workflow is simple. I give the AI a topic, the facts I want in it, and the rules: my voice, plain language, no filler, every post must carry something only I could say. It returns a draft. I read it with a red pen and decide what survives.

That last sentence matters more than everything else in this essay. The AI writes. I decide.

People think automation means the machine does the work. It does not. Automation means the machine does the drafting and the human does the deciding. The deciding is the work.

What worked

Speed first. A first draft that would take me two hours appears in five minutes. Even after editing, a piece that took three hours now takes one. When you publish often, that difference is the whole business.

Structure second. The AI is good at shape. It opens with the question, covers the middle, closes with something actionable. I am not naturally a tidy writer. The machine gives me a skeleton that a human editor would charge me for.

Consistency third. Every article gets the same treatment: subheadings, a headline that stays short, a checklist where one fits. Humans get lazy at 11 PM. Machines do not.

These are real wins. I wrote about the newsroom automation experiment earlier (I Automated My Newsroom for Two Days) and found the same pattern: the machine is excellent at rhythm and terrible at judgment. That piece is the full autopsy.

What failed

Now the failures, because there were several.

First, voice. The first drafts sound like brochures. Everything is “leverage” and “unlock” and “in today’s fast-paced world.” My voice is plain sentences about things that actually happened to me. No machine knows what my voice is until I show it examples and cut the corporate filler out of every single draft. I cut it every time.

Second, the generic trap. Left alone, the AI writes advice that could have come from anyone, anywhere, about anything. “Build an audience. Ship fast. Listen to users.” True, and useless. This is why I added the hard originality rule to every brief: if the draft does not contain something I lived, tested, or broke, it does not ship. Skip rather than publish filler.

Third, invented specifics. This is the dangerous one. The AI will happily tell you I earned a number I never earned, or quote someone who never spoke. It does not lie on purpose. It fills gaps the way a tired reporter might, except it never feels tired and never doubts itself. Every number, every quote, every “I remember when” gets checked against my own memory before it goes live. Anything unverifiable gets cut.

Fourth, the comfort problem. After a few good drafts, I caught myself reading them with less care. The machine had earned my trust and was spending it. So I built the checklist to keep me honest, because trust without verification is how automation quietly starts publishing nonsense.

The editor’s checklist

This is the actual list I run through before anything goes live. Steal it.

1. Does this contain something only I could say? A lived detail, a real number, a failure nobody else has written about. If not, it gets rewritten or skipped.
2. Is every fact verifiable? Numbers, dates, quotes, claims about what happened. If I cannot check it against my own memory or a record I trust, it gets cut.
3. Is the advice actionable? A reader should be able to do something differently after reading. If the takeaway is “be brave,” the piece is not done.
4. Does it sound like me? Plain sentences. No corporate filler. No advice I would not give a friend.
5. Does it say nothing new? The internet is full of essays that restate other essays. If my draft is just one more, it gets skipped.
6. Would I sign my name to it? This is the final test. Publishing means my name is on it, forever. If I would not argue for it in person, it does not ship.
7. Check the links. Interlinks to my own past posts should genuinely help the reader, not exist for the search engine.

Item five is the one that kills the most drafts. Roughly one in three drafts does not ship. That is a feature, not a bug. A workflow that publishes everything the machine writes is not automation. It is surrender.

I wrote a longer version of my writing playbook earlier (How I Write Articles Google Actually Ranks), if you want the full SEO side of how I structure these articles for search.

Where the human wins

People ask whether AI writing will replace writers. After months of running this experiment, my answer is sharper than that.

The machine wins at drafting, structure, rhythm, and recall. It never forgets a format. It never gets writer’s block. It is the best intern I have ever had.

The human wins at taste, truth, and experience. Taste is knowing which draft ships and which dies. Truth is knowing what actually happened. Experience is the only thing no model can download: I ran Scriling for years, I failed at products you have never heard of, I built Niguro from scratch in Nepal. Those years are the product. The AI is the typewriter.

I wrote about the three companies I built before Niguro (Three Companies, One Lesson) and what each one taught me. Every essay on this site draws from that well. The machine cannot draw from it. It can only be handed water from it, one cup at a time, and told not to spill.

The verdict

Letting AI write my first drafts was worth it. My output went up, my structure got better, and the discipline of editing someone else’s words, even machine words, sharpened my own thinking.

But the experiment only works because of the rule at its center: the human decides. Every draft passes through my judgment before it reaches you. The moment that stops being true, this site stops being mine and becomes a content mill with my name on it.

If you are thinking of automating your own writing, start there. Build the checklist before you build the workflow. Decide what you will never let the machine do, and write that rule down. Then let it type.

The typing is the easy part. It always was.