Who Held the Pen

I

Something is going on in boardrooms, classrooms and pulpits that almost no one will admit to. People are writing with AI and hiding it. They scrub out the telltale phrases, rough up the polish, and deny it when asked. It has the air of a speakeasy.

I find this strange, because the history of writing is a history of other hands.

Near the end of Romans, a different voice breaks into the most consequential letter ever written: "I Tertius, who wrote this epistle, salute you in the Lord." Paul did not hold the pen. A scribe did. No one calls Romans the letter of Tertius.

Authorship was never a matter of whose hand held the pen. It follows the judgment: whose argument it is, who decided what stayed, and who will answer for it.

II

The help has only grown closer to the words since then.

Milton, blind, composed Paradise Lost in his head, held the lines in memory, and dictated them to whoever could take them down. Then he had them read back and revised.

Dostoevsky, facing a deadline that would have cost him the rights to his work, dictated The Gambler to a young stenographer named Anna Snitkina in under a month. He later married her.

Henry James paced the room while a typist took down his late novels. Agatha Christie, the best-selling novelist of all time, spoke her later books into a Dictaphone, had her secretary type them, and corrected the typescript by hand.

Then the editors, who did more than take down. Ezra Pound cut The Waste Land nearly in half, and Eliot later dedicated the poem to him as "il miglior fabbro", the better craftsman. Maxwell Perkins cut tens of thousands of words from Thomas Wolfe, and pressed Fitzgerald until Gatsby came into focus. The Waste Land is still Eliot's. Gatsby is still Fitzgerald's.

Scribe, stenographer, typist, Dictaphone, editor. At every step the helper came nearer to the sentence, and at no step did the author change.

The King James Bible was made by committee, and not a neutral one. Forty-seven scholars spent seven years on it, working under rules set by the king and his bishops. Much of their New Testament came from William Tyndale, who had been strangled and burned at the stake for translating it, and whose name appears nowhere on the title page. Where Tyndale did not suit the Crown, they changed him. The Greek ekklesia means an assembly of people, and Tyndale had rendered it "congregation." The king's rules required "church," the institution, with its bishops and the king himself at its head. The margin notes that had made the Geneva Bible popular, which James called "seditious" and "traitorous," were banned.

Millions still treat the King James as authoritative, and some as the only faithful Bible in English. Forty-seven hands, a king's politics, a bishop's interests and a dead man's inherited sentences, and none of it has cost the book its authority. If we can live with that much human traffic in a book we call holy, we can live with a machine in a paragraph we call ours.

III

None of them asked a machine for the next sentence. I do. The machine proposes, and that is what unsettles people. It is Tertius, Anna and Pound in one box. But proposal is not authorship, and neither is acceptance. Authorship is the decision to keep the line, to kill it, or to make it say the thing you will still say when the machine is off.

I am not defending theft. A stolen paragraph is stolen whether it came off a page or through a machine. A student who hands his thinking to a machine before he has learned to think has cheated himself first.

How the machines were trained on other people's books is a separate quarrel, and a serious one. The company behind Claude has agreed to pay authors $1.5 billion over pirated copies. That one is about property. This one is about credit.

After the hours I have spent on Claude's legal drafting, if it owes royalties to everyone who taught it to write, I may have a receivable. It has read more books than I have. Reading them did not teach it what to say.

Nor am I defending prompt and post. I am defending directed use. A writer with a voice will not lose it to a machine. A writer without one may rent one and never notice.

IV

Here is what I do. I use AI to help me write, and it takes me many hours. Out of the box, the machine writes like everyone: smooth, agreeable, well organised and empty. It hedges. It summarises what it just said. It reaches for the same dozen phrases. So I instruct it. I prompt it and reject it and prompt it again. I strike its favourite lines. I tell it when it has missed, and why. I take a draft from one language model and hand it to another to be critiqued, then argue with the critique. I refine, and refine again, until the sentence says what I meant and sounds the way I talk.

That is not outsourcing a voice.

It is knowing your voice well enough to teach it.

Nor is the machine my only help. I use an editor. I have a communications officer who helps me refine our messaging. Our general counsel will, at times, write an entire letter for me, and I will refine it with only a few brush strokes before it goes out under my name. The sentences may be his. The decision to send it is mine, and so is the answer when someone challenges it. I hope every one of them is using AI to help refine and collate the work.

The thoughts are mine. The arguments are mine. The letters are shaped by me.

V

Did you use AI? That question is already obsolete, and it rewards the people willing to lie. The questions that matter are the ones this essay began with. Whose judgment is it? Who decided what stayed? Who will answer for it? Could you rebuild the argument with the machine switched off?

If yes, the work is yours. If no, the problem was never the software.

Shame the tool and you teach people to hide it, and hiding is where the dishonesty begins.

We have built AI detectors to catch people using the tool. Classrooms, contests and hiring do need rules. Some will ban it outright, and should. Where it is allowed, make disclosure the rule.

Reward intelligent use rather than pretending it is not happening. Give awards for the best work made with AI, openly declared. Reward the writer who taught the machine a voice, rejected what was false or dull, and signed what remained.

Tertius put his name on the letter, and it cost Paul nothing. My own surname means scribe, and I have never taken it as an insult.