Author’s note

From my ‘in-progress’ latest book: *** Author’s note This book was co-written with Claude, an AI made by Anthropic. I am telling you this in the first pages rather than burying it in an acknowledgements section because transparency about how a book was made seems more respectful to the reader than hoping they don’t notice, and because the question of whether AI-assisted writing is ‘real’ writing is, in my view, the wrong question asked by the wrong people for the wrong reasons. Here is how it worked. Every argument, claim, personal story, clinical observation, and editorial decision in this book is mine. I directed the structure, chose the sources, determined the voice, and made every call about what stayed and what got cut. Claude drafted prose from my instructions, suggested connections I hadn’t considered, tracked references with a reliability my ADHD brain cannot match, and produced output at a speed that would have taken me, working alone, approximately three years rather than three months. The ideas are mine. The research verification is collaborative. The sentences were produced by an AI and edited, reshaped, and inhabited by a human until they sounded like me rather than like a machine pretending to be me, which is a distinction any reader with a functioning ear can detect and most critics with a functioning agenda will ignore. The question I find more interesting than ‘is this real writing?’ is: what happens to a neurodivergent author whose executive function makes sustained long-form writing physiologically expensive when they gain access to a tool that handles the physiological expense while preserving the intellectual and creative control? The answer, in my case, is that they write a 50,000-word book in the time it would previously have taken to write one chapter, and the book is better than it would have been without the collaboration, because the human’s energy goes into thinking rather than into the mechanical production of sentences, and thinking is what the human was always good at. If this troubles you, I understand. The relationship between human creativity and machine capability is genuinely unsettled, and anyone who claims to have resolved it is selling something. What I can tell you is that every word in this book passed through a human mind that has lived the experience it describes, and that the mind in question would rather be honest about its tools than perform a fiction of solitary genius that was never true for any writer and is less true now than ever. *** @Emma Klint will understand

– Lee Hopkins