A Four-Part Essay Series on AI, Arrogance, and the Future of Writing

January is a strange month.

It carries the quiet expectation that something should change—that a page has turned, even if we’re not quite sure what comes next. We take stock. We reassess. We decide, consciously or not, which parts of the past year we’re carrying forward and which ones we’re ready to leave behind.

For me, this January marked a shift.

If you’ve been reading this blog for a while, most of what I’ve written here has lived close to home. Since publishing my debut novel, The Preacher’s Son, these posts have traced that journey—what it took to get a book into the world, the anxiety that came with it, and the themes that shaped the story itself: faith, belonging, silence, family, and the cost of telling the truth. Those reflections were personal by design. They came from lived experience and from a season that asked me to look backward in order to move forward.

That foundation still matters. It always will.

But with a new year came new questions—ones I didn’t fully expect.

Since publishing the book, I’ve been asked more than once how I feel about artificial intelligence and writing. Sometimes the questions are genuine. Sometimes they’re teasing. Sometimes they carry an edge. “It’s easy to write a book these days with AI doing it for you.” I’ve even been accused—half-jokingly, half-seriously—of using AI to write my novel.

Those comments are usually said lightly, but they reveal something deeper. AI unsettles people. Not because it exists, but because it challenges assumptions we’ve held—about effort, originality, authorship, and who gets credit for creation. It presses on our belief that human ingenuity sits at the top of the hierarchy, untouchable and unquestioned.

That discomfort lingered with me.

At the same time, I found myself reading a work of fiction centered on AI—Artificial Truth by J.M. Lee, selected through Amazon Prime’s First Reads program. What struck me wasn’t the technology itself, but how familiar the underlying questions felt. The story wasn’t really about machines. It was about fear, responsibility, creation, and what happens when humans bring something into the world before fully understanding what they’ve made.

It reminded me of Frankenstein.

Mary Shelley’s novel is often reduced to the image of a monster, but the story has always been about something else entirely: the arrogance of the creator, the refusal to take responsibility, and the danger of abandoning what we bring into being simply because it unsettles us. The monster wasn’t born monstrous. It became so after rejection.

That connection—the way we talk about AI today, the fear it provokes, and the certainty with which we label it a threat—felt impossible to ignore.

This series grew out of that convergence: a new year, a shift in conversation, personal questions I kept circling, and a piece of fiction that reframed them for me. It also marks a subtle change in direction for this blog. Not a departure from storytelling, but a widening of the lens—from my own story to the broader idea of authorship itself.

Over the next four weeks, I’ll be exploring what AI reveals about writing and writers—not from a technical standpoint, but from a human one. This isn’t a guide on how to use AI, and it isn’t an argument for replacing writers with machines. It’s an examination of why this moment provokes such strong reactions, and what those reactions say about creativity, ego, bias, and responsibility.

The phrase technological mirrors is intentional.

AI doesn’t invent meaning. It reflects patterns—our preferences, our assumptions, our blind spots. When those reflections make us uncomfortable, it’s tempting to call the mirror the problem. But history suggests the discomfort usually runs deeper. Humans have always been quick to declare our own creations superior simply because they come from us. That belief, left unexamined, hardens into arrogance.

This series will begin by looking at creation and fear through Frankenstein, move into the accusation that AI “cheats” authorship, examine the myth of creative supremacy, and conclude by asking where ethical responsibility actually belongs. Along the way, I’ll return to some of the personal questions that sparked this in the first place—including the assumptions people make about writing in an age where tools are evolving faster than our comfort with them.

These questions are part of the same continuum. Writing has always been about more than words on a page. It’s about identity, responsibility, and the courage to look at ourselves clearly.

This series is simply the next mirror.