🤝 Is Human + AI Co-Authorship the New Normal?

Lately, there’s been a lot of chatter about spotting AI content and banning the bots.
But here’s my question:

💡 What if the best content turns out to be a true collaboration between human creativity and AI capability?

---

🛠 From Tools to Teammates

We’ve always used tools to write better — spellcheck, grammar check, Google searches… remember those?
AI is just the next step. The difference is, this “tool” can actually talk back, offer ideas, and help format our ideas to reveal their brightest light.

• Suggest a creative angle 🧠
• Organize scattered notes into a clean structure 📂
• Polish wording while keeping your unique voice 🎯

That’s teamwork that can maximize your value.

---

🧭 How I Captain the Article with AI

There are a lot of things going on in my world that I like to talk over with my friends, and AI helps me get the conversation started.

The typical AI assistance goes like this:

I start chatting about something I am personally very interested in. This might not be everyone's interest, but the conversation can develop into one that is. When it does, it’s article time!

Whenever the conversation becomes something I feel my other friends would find valuable, I signal AI that I want to make an article about this previous conversation. Truthfully, new AI-assisted “Captains” need to be aware: articles from AI should be treated more like templates that require your creative filling-in of passion and personally unique nuance. Otherwise, you will sound like everyone else. Without you, the article will be rather dull — basically as interesting as reading an encyclopedia.

After AI makes the first draft, I edit it and suggest a few things. Telling AI to edit it directly, I have found, is problematic because it tends to edit the whole thing and sometimes removes some good parts along with its edits.

When the basic text is sounding great, I save it to file and ask AI to adapt it to the social media sites that have the most friends interested in that topic. This generally means adding Markdown/HTML, placing relevant emojis thoughtfully, or splitting it into multi-threaded posts for hyper-abbreviated mini-media sites.

That’s it — then it’s off to post the article!

---

📚 A New Literacy

Tomorrow’s writers will need a new skill: prompt literacy.
It’s not just knowing how to write — it’s knowing how to guide an AI to bring out your own best thinking.

So maybe the real question isn’t “Was this written by a human or AI?”
Maybe it’s:

Does this post have value for the community?

---

💬 Your turn

What do you think?
Should AI + human co-authoring be the new normal — if the content is valuable?
Drop your thoughts below ⬇️

---

(Article by Steven Tree Baxter in collaboration with ChatGPT)