Guilty
Manny stared at the open page, tension twisting in his gut. The story was complete, apart from this one, final step — something the publisher insisted on.
The heading he’d just scrawled in his notebook stared accusingly back at him:
“AI USE STATEMENT.”
He’d read the submission guidelines of course — multiple times — although why they called them “guidelines” was beyond him, as a single violation, no matter how small, spelled indtant rejection.
It was why he was sitting here, writing in this notebook with his favorite Lamy founrtain pen — too anxious to even use his usual word processor, lest some covert AI took it on itself to suggest a grammatical change or, God forbid, correct a typo!
In his paranoia, he’s tried to avoid avery possible way AI might somehow encroach on the story. Even down to the pen. Smiling to himself, he wondered if he should have gone the whole nine yards and cut a quill, or at least used an inkwell. But at least the ink stains on his now-sweaty fingers (why did that always happen?), and the smudges on the page, were testaments to his rejection of anything that artificial intelligence might corrupt.
What did bother him, though, was that this was a story that needed to be told, no matter how it made its way from his head to his readers. Or so he thought.
This wasn’t about ego, or prestige. OK, maybe it was, just a bit. But in his mind, it was more than that. And certainly more than a story that simply entertained and got his name in front of people (and, in the process, made it easier for them to find his work). It was about society’s relationship with AI, and how people worked with a technology that simply did not fit into the old rules governing how they behaved, did things, or — in this case — did not do them.
The story was important, he told himself. It deserved to be read. No, Manny corrected himself, it needed to be read.
And yet, those old rules still dictated what you could or could not do as a writer. The irony made him bristle as he thought about the AI Use Statement. The publisher’s rules assumed, or so it seemed, that the whole point of writing was to prove you were a master story teller — someone who could master story telling with no artificial aids whatsoever. (And when was that ever the case, Manny thought to himself). It was almost, Manny thought, a test of your very humanity. And nothing at all to do with the ideas you were trying to convery, or how they might change the reader, or at least make them think.
He turned back to the AI Use Statement, a fresh sheen of finger-sweat making the pen slippery in his hand. He’d done everything right. There was not one idea, sentence, turn of phrase, synonym, or grammatical correction, that wasn’t the product of his writer’s brain and his now-aching hand.
But there was one place he hadn’t been able to protect.
The waves of guilt passed over him again, squeezing their way into his increasingly illegible writing, declaring for all to see that he was carrying a burden he felt no writer should.
It was his mind that was the weak link. That, and his curiosity. The two things that made him good at his craft, now turning agains him.
He’d used AI in the past of course. Hadn’t everyone? In fact he’d used it a lot — everything from asking random questions to deep research. And this had prompted the question behind the story, a question that asked what the point of writing fiction actually is. And here, he’d asked himself, if it’s to open the minds and imaginations of readers to new ideas, possibilities, and challenges, why shouldn’t writers use AI to excel at this?
As it turned out, the question was more complex than he’d initially thought. But, based on his work with AI, he’d come up with a pretty compelling narrative.
The ideas and narrative were, of course, his, and his alone. But that early association with AI had planted the seeds of guilt that were now flowering in his gut.
That wasn’t the worst of it though.
In a moment of inattention — stupid, stupid, stupid, he heard himself saying for the umpteenth time — he’d asked his AI about the artificual intelligence policy of the publishing site he was intending to submit to.
It was that conversation that had led to him breaking out the notebook and fountain pen, and which had led to this point as he sat looking miserably at the blank space below the heading.
Finally, he took the lid off the Lamy, leaned forward, and wrote one, shakey, word:
“Guilty.”
Author’s Note
With Guilty I set out to tell a story about a story which was as much about a lived process as it was the words that finally arrived on the published page. I also wanted to say something about “guidelines” about AI use that some publishers of short stories use that feel increasingly out of step with today’s reality. The result was a short story that was devised without recorse to any form of electronic aids, and written and edited by hand, and then hand transcribed — errors and all — into the markdown file that led to the page you’re reading. And for completeness, I’ve included the original and admittedly messy scans of the notebook pages below.
I’d like to say that my only AI slips in writing Guilty were those that the story pivots on. But it doesn’t quite end there. The website rowanashby.com was developed and is maintained by Anthropic’s Claude, which adds another twist to things. To get the story from the markdown file (which really was hand transcribed) to the web, it was processed and converted to html by apps written and updated by Claude Code. And because I needed help adding the notebook pages, Claude got to see what I had written in the process. And so, while this may be all my own writing — ink stains, typos, corrections, and all — reading it is only made possible through AI.
I guess that’s yet anther reason I might feel guilty. That is, if I was playing by the old rules!
The original Guilty notebook pages