I don’t want to make bruising fun of this poor girl. It’s mainly just sad that she seems to feel she’s committed a mortal sin against the sacred craft by having AI do basic proofreading. But it does make me genuinely chuckle to see her itemize by nationality the fifty-three people she “deceived” like casualties in an international incident. You can practically hear the cello as the map slowly darkens country by country. If she had simply written, “I realized my ‘100% no AI’ statement was technically inaccurate because I used ChatGPT to proofread one post, so I’ve changed it,” there would be nothing to laugh at. Instead she has imagined a blast radius. Fifty-three people walked innocently into her website, believing themselves to be in a pristine human-text environment, and emerged with invisible synthetic shrapnel lodged in their souls. Even funnier, the odds are good that they were mostly search crawlers, link-preview bots, or other automated scanners rather than a solitary Dane sitting thoughtfully by a window, coffee cooling beside him, devastated to discover that the author had used ChatGPT for proofreading. It may instead have been a server in Copenhagen requesting the page for 0.14 seconds.
But as I said, it’s more sad than anything. The “contamination” model has overpowered an individual conscience. Grammarly? Word’s grammar checker? The red spelling squiggle? An editor who changes a comma? Those are presumably compatible with “100% me.” But ChatGPT correcting precisely the same comma introduces some tiny metaphysical admixture of Not-Me. This is how you know a purity regime has really taken hold: you no longer need inquisitors. The prosecution is internalized. Congratulations to all the self-appointed Torquemadas of the online world; your fanatical efforts have made a difference.
Antonette, dear, you’ve done nothing wrong. If I can offer one bit of advice, it would be not to make grand oaths about how you will or won’t write, especially if you’re new at it. Just practice, experiment, and enjoy yourself. Use AI or don’t; that choice is yours, and you’re free to change your mind tomorrow. But don’t let an imaginary audience of suspicious readers turn writing into a purity test, with every new tool or bit of assistance treated as a possible moral failure. You’re learning how you want to work. Give yourself room to find out.