I’ll say it straight out: There is little that unsettles me more than people who serve up reams of AI-generated text on public platforms, passing it off as their own work.

My feelings about this, I admit, are rooted in my journalistic training. For decades, editors have drilled the importance of accuracy and transparency into young writers’ skulls. Accuracy to the extent that we were taught to cross-check each fact with multiple sources to make sure it was airtight. And transparency to the extent that publishing any phrase from an uncited source was a firing offense.

These days, such rules of attribution have apparently become relics, trampled in the name of ever greater efficiency. The more of your communication you outsource to AI, the new thinking goes, the more to-dos you’ll be able to tackle in less time.

This mindset is already being taken to ghoulish extremes, as when an elected official in my area replied to voters online with paragraphs of AI slop — and, when called on it, retorted that her points stood even if they were machine-generated. Sometimes, though, AI users chase speed and optimization in subtler ways. They may write their own drafts, but paste them into chatGPT to make them 20 percent smarter-sounding or more clickable within seconds.

I understand the appeal of getting a polished-seeming result without struggle. When I first tried chatGPT, I played around with plugging in story headlines, asking the bot what it thought, and watching as it spat back other options it deemed better.

But I knew I wouldn’t publish these headlines, no matter how optimized or click-worthy they might have been. Relying on a chatbot to think and write for you, without disclosing that that’s what you’re doing, breaks the trust between writer and reader. That trust is just as critical — and just as hard to restore once broken — whether you’re a professional writer, an occasional online poster, or someone messaging dates after swiping right. (It’s one thing if you’re upfront about using AI to communicate, but right now, the vast majority of users are not.)

I’m not a total AI philistine. I think AI tools can be useful in certain contexts, like programming, voice transcription, and early cancer detection. I’m even OK with using the tools to generate meeting summaries or hunt up human-written research papers.

I draw the line at allowing any AI model to assist my writing in online posts, articles, or anywhere else. Will it mean my blog titles aren’t as clickable? Maybe. Will it mean I set a slower work pace? Almost certainly. But will it mean that, when you read my writing, you are hearing from me, and not from some mash-up of me and a chatbot? Absolutely.

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It’s the beginning of August, which means I’m due for some calculated withdrawal. Connecting with readers and listeners from all over to share The Art of Pacing has been incredibly fun and motivating. At the same time, I’m an introvert at heart, and I’m also someone who needs stretches of deep work time to develop new ideas. The “whirl of gaiety” is slowing, and I welcome the upcoming quiet. I hope you are finding your own moments of quiet this summer, whether brief or extended.

One last hurrah for Bay Area folks: Come out and see me in conversation Sunday, Aug 30 with terrific poet and memoirist Rebecca Black at Book Passage in Corte Madera. We’ll be talking all things pacing and writing-related — join the discussion, meet fellow book lovers, and pick up assorted free book swag!