Author Insights

Writing Through Dyslexia: How AI Helped Me Find My Voice

By El Mehdi Said

I want to be transparent about something most authors keep quiet: I have dyslexia, and I use AI to help me write. Not to write for me — to help me express, in clear language, the stories and feelings that have lived inside me for two decades. This is the story of how that became possible.

For most of my life, the act of writing felt like trying to push water uphill. Letters swapped places. Sentences I could hear perfectly in my mind arrived on the page tangled and wrong. I had stories — about love, about a wall in Fez, about a woman chained in a cage — but I was certain they would die with me, unspoken.

I tried. Many times. Each attempt ended the same way: a few pages, then shame, then silence. The ideas were not the problem. The door between my mind and the page was.