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The question every creator now carries is not whether to use these tools. It is where to draw the line. And a line drawn from a rule will break, so I want to offer a principle instead.
How I Actually Write
Let me be specific about my own practice, because vague advice about creativity in the AI age is worth very little.
When I write, and I write a great deal, there is a part I protect completely and a part I am happy to hand off. The thinking is mine. The wrestling with what I actually believe, the search for the true sentence, the moment where an idea finally clicks into place, I do not outsource any of that. That is not the overhead of the work. That is the work. If a machine did it for me, there would be no point in my having written anything at all, because the writing was never mainly about producing text. It was about becoming clear.
What do I use AI for? The scaffolding. Checking a fact quickly, reorganising a messy outline, catching a clumsy repetition, summarising something long so I can decide whether to read it in full. Useful, ordinary, low stakes tasks that free my attention for the part that matters. What I refuse to hand over is the voice and the meaning. The moment the machine starts deciding what I think, I have lost the only thing I had to offer.
Draw the Line With a Principle, Not a Rule
People want a rule for this. Is it allowed to use AI or not. I do not trust rules here, because they break the moment a new situation arrives. I trust a principle instead, and mine is simple.
Use AI for what you do not care about deeply. Protect what you do.
If a task is mere production, something describable and repeatable that was never where your soul lived, hand it over and feel no guilt. But the part you care about, the part that carries your actual voice, the reason you make anything at all, guard that with everything you have. The danger of the AI age is not that the machine will storm in and seize your creativity. The danger is quieter. It is that you will hand it over yourself, one convenient shortcut at a time, until one day you look up and there is nothing of you left in the work.
The Integrity Test
Before I use AI in anything I care about, I run four questions. They take ten seconds and they keep me honest.
### Am I using this to do more of what matters, or to avoid it?
The same tool can free you for deeper work or let you dodge it entirely. Which one is this. If I am using AI to skip the very struggle that would have made me better, I am not saving time. I am trading away my own growth.
### Whose voice comes out at the end?
Read the result honestly. Does it sound like me, or like the smooth, averaged voice of a machine trained on everyone. If my fingerprints are gone, I have not created anything. I have laundered someone else's patterns and signed my name to them.
### Would I be at peace if the reader knew exactly how this was made?
This is the shame test, and it is clarifying. If knowing the method would embarrass me, the method is wrong. Honest work can stand the light.
### Is this the part I care about, or the part I do not?
Back to the principle. If it is production, the machine is welcome. If it is the heart of the thing, my hands stay on it.
Roots and Reach: Building From Port Harcourt for the World
I want to speak directly to the creative professional building from Nigeria, from anywhere on the continent. You are in an unusual moment. The same tools that threaten routine creative work have also demolished the walls that used to lock you out. From Port Harcourt I can now reach an audience, produce at a level, and compete in ways that were simply impossible a few years ago. That is a genuine gift and I do not take it lightly.
But here is the trap. It is tempting to use these global tools to sound global, which usually means sounding like everyone else, sanding off the specific edges of where you come from until your work could have been made anywhere by anyone. That is a race to the bottom. Your advantage was never that you could imitate the centre more cheaply. Your advantage is that you carry a specific place, a specific people, a specific way of seeing that the dominant tools do not understand.
So the creative task for us is roots and reach at the same time. Use every tool that extends your reach. But stay rooted in the particular soil you grew from, because that rootedness is the one thing you own that cannot be generated. The world does not need one more voice that sounds like the machine. It needs what only you, standing where you stand, can say.
What the Creative Life Is Actually About
In the end the creative life was never about the tools. It was never about the brush or the software or the model. Those change every few years and they will keep changing. The creative life is about having something true to say and finding the courage to say it in a form only you could give it.
AI does not change that. It only raises the stakes. In a world where the machine can generate an ocean of competent, meaningless content, the person with the courage to make something real, rooted, and true stands out more than ever. Do not spend your one creative life anxiously racing the machine at the things it is good at. Spend it doing the one thing it will never do. Mean something, and have the courage to sign it.
