Author Insights

AI Didn't Give Me a Voice. It Made It Easier to Use the One I Already Had.

By El Mehdi Said

There is a sentence I hear more than any other when people learn I use AI to help me write: "So the AI wrote your books?" No. It didn't. I had a voice for two decades before I had a tool that let me use it. AI didn't give me a voice. It made it easier to use the one I already had. That distinction matters more than I can say.

I have dyslexia. For most of my life, that meant the distance between what I felt and what I could put on a page felt unbridgeable. I had stories — about a wall in old Fez, about a woman chained in a cage, about a creature who stays when every human has left. They were complete inside me. I could hear them. I just couldn't get them out in a form anyone else could read without stumbling over my sentences and giving up.

That is not the same as having nothing to say. It is the opposite. It is having too much to say and no reliable way to say it. The voice was always there. The door was closed.