I had AI write my newsletter

And I forgot I'd even written it

It’s 11PM on Sunday — way past the deadline for the newsletter we’re supposed to be sending out for Small Creator Big World — and Bhav Sharma turns her laptop to me: Is this newsletter draft supposed to be done?

I skim the title. The Shiny Dime. Yeah I wrote that… I think?

She points at the picture placement. “Becky, this picture you inserted is right at the end. And it doesn’t make sense because this is a newsletter. The picture is supposed to break up text. And I know it’s a small thing, but it’s these kinds of things that introduce doubt.”

Oof.

The word “doubt” hits me hard.

I go into fix mode. Open the Notion page on my own laptop. “Give me 5 mins to fix this.”

Truth is, I had no recollection of writing this newsletter. It was a write-up of one of our office hour calls (a no-pressure drop-in session for small creators), and I’d done it entirely with AI. Claude’s Opus 4.6 was so good that I’d probably batched four or five newsletters after every single call, just to see how many I could juice out of one conversation. My logic: if the conversation was useful to one person on the call, it could be useful for more.

And using AI made sense. I didn’t have a ton of free time outside of work, so an office hour session yielding 4x newsletters felt like a win.

Simple enough, right?

The kicker: because AI made the whole process so frictionless, I completely forgot whether I’d done the task at all. Never mind whether I’d proofread it.

As I edited, the mistakes jumped out. “The Shiny Dime” was a concept from Write of Passage, not journalism school (I didn’t even go to one). The headline said “Shiny Dime” but the body talked about three unrelated pieces of writing advice.

In other words, the AI hallucinated the fuck out of the newsletter.

It only took me five minutes to fix. Bhav read through it, hyperlinked past posts, sent it out.

Then she asked the question that stuck: “I don’t get it. Your Substack writing is so good. Why doesn’t it translate to SCBW?”

I mumbled something about treating the two differently. Wanting SCBW to grow faster, needing to be value-first rather than personal, and I didn’t know how to do that.

But there’s probably more to it.

And more bluntly, it’s that I automated the caring out of it.

Here’s what happened when AI handled my creative work: the bottleneck was never time. It was attention. And when I removed the friction, aka the staring at a blank page, the slow shaping of a sentence, the rereading at midnight, I also removed the messy oily fingerprints that the piece would otherwise had.

My Substack is always born from a blank Notion doc. I write every word. The writing is the thinking, so drafting the post bird by bird is how it all comes together. There is no shortcut for that.

With SCBW, I’d optimised for output. And output without proper attention is just slop.

It feels weird to admit this as someone who uses AI every day, who genuinely believes it makes certain kinds of work better and faster. But “better and faster” assumes you know what the work is for. I was so focused on what AI could produce that I forgot to ask whether I still cared about what it was producing.

And whenever I stray too close to the sun, I’ll remember the pang that the word “doubt” did.

---

Update log:

• 👩🏻‍💻 Got an idea to ship a CLI for my YouTube carousel web app. That’s coming soon…

• 💼 Officially registered a sole proprietorship! I’m a business owner now 🤯

• 🤒 For some reason, I lost my voice... It’s my 3rd cold this year. I think I’m going through it.

• 🎨 Finally did a flipthrough of my art book on my (very dormant) art YouTube channel!

• 🤖 Learning how ChatGPT can insanely level up thumbnails by sharpening a screenshot from a video

• 📬 Wrote some thank you cards for my colleagues. Marking the end of an era fr

Work with me: https://go.beckyisj.com/workwithme

Some links are affiliate links, meaning that I may receive a commission if you make a purchase through the links at no cost to you.