Nobody Asks a Painter What Brush She Used

Why is it acceptable to do that to writers?

The AI Detector Is Teaching Readers Not to Trust Writers

This morning, sitting here drinking my coffee and still thinking about the latest AI argument, something occurred to me.

Painting is the other thing I do. Yup, I am an artist. Have been a career artist for 30 years.

People sometimes ask what inspired a painting. They want to know where the idea came from, what I was feeling, what I was trying to express, or why I chose a particular subject.

They do not ask what tools I used. Nor do they do not stand in front of one of my paintings and demand to know the brand of brushes, whether I used a palette knife, whether I projected a reference image, or whether anyone helped me stretch the canvas.

The tools are not the first thing they see. The ART is seen is experienced before respond and only then, if they are interested, do they become curious about the process.

Why is writing suddenly being treated differently?

For the past nineteen months, readers have responded to my work with lines like “that was a brilliant phrase,” “I have never heard it put that way,” “you said exactly what I have been feeling,” and “this made me see my life differently.”

Not once did those readers stop and ask whether I used AI.

It did not occur to them because they were busy responding to the idea. Isn’t that what we want, as writers, to illicit a response within the reader

?

They were encountering the work the way people have always encountered art, writing, music, and every other form of human expression.

They were asking themselves:

Did this move me, did it make me think, did I recognize myself in it, did this writer give language to something I could not name?

Now we are teaching readers to ask a different question first.

Did she cheat?

That is what the AI detector changes.

It does not merely provide information; it introduces suspicion.

It redirects the reader’s attention away from the meaning of the work and toward an investigation of how it was produced.

That is not neutral.

It changes the relationship between the writer and the reader.

Before the reader has even had time to consider the thought, the platform has planted another thought in its place:

Should I trust this?

And that is the part I find deeply troubling. And why I have chosen to not allow my articles, nor my notes be filtered through an AI Detector.

We have allowed other people’s fear of AI to change the way we look at writers.

Instead of asking where an idea came from, we are being trained to question whether the writer is legitimate; instead of talking about the work, we are talking about the tools; instead of wondering whether something is true, useful, beautiful, funny, provocative, or meaningful, we are asking whether a machine helped polish a sentence.

In painting, the brush does not get credit for the vision, the paint does not invent the subject, and the palette knife does not decide what the artist is trying to say.

A tool is a tool. It can assist the process, but it cannot live the life, supply the memories, or create the convictions. It cannot know what it felt like to be five years old watching Captain Kangaroo, or seventy years old wondering what dreams are still waiting to be reclaimed. It cannot be me.

The same is true of writing.

The idea, the story, the point of view — those come from me: seventy years of living, observing, surviving, laughing, losing, painting, questioning, and paying attention. The voice is mine, too.

Using a tool to help shape, organize, or polish those thoughts does not erase the mind that created them.

And yet, the AI detector encourages readers to act as though the tool is more important than the thought.

That does not strike me as valuable.

That strikes me as especially damaging in the faith and spirituality space, where people come seeking meaning, connection, insight, comfort, possibility, and truth.

A detector cannot measure any of those things.

It cannot tell you whether the writer believes what she wrote, whether a sentence came from lived experience, or whether the work helped someone through a lonely afternoon, changed a decision, reopened a dream, or reminded a woman that her life is not over.

It can only encourage the reader to inspect the machinery.

Last night, someone came into my space and asked why I had turned off the AI detector.

He asked what I was worried about.

But he was not engaging with my work — he was investigating my compliance. He was not curious about the idea; he was curious about whether I had passed the test.

That is exactly the culture this tool creates.

It does not create better readers so much as inspectors; it does not encourage discernment so much as suspicion; it does not deepen the conversation so much as replace it.

Curiosity about a writer’s process can be fascinating.

But curiosity comes after appreciation.

Suspicion arrives before the work has even been allowed to speak.

That is not a culture worth participating in.

My readers should get to encounter the thought first — deciding for themselves whether it resonates, challenges them, makes them laugh, irritates them, or opens something inside them, and responding to the work itself before anything else.

The same courtesy we give every other artist.

Because we are teaching readers to interrogate the tools before they have even encountered the thought.

And that is a loss for writers, a loss for readers, and a loss for anyone who still believes words are supposed to connect human beings, not provide fresh evidence for the internet police.

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Hi, I’m Monica,

I successfully retired from abandoning myself to keep everyone else comfortable. I publish articles for women over 60 who want to reclaim their dreams and desires that they put on hold while caring for everybody else. One article reached 75,000 readerssharing.

Come join the party of irrevrant yet sometimes sobering thoughts, ideas and motivations center around the core idea: WE ARE NOT DONE YET!