I am on Substack enough to know that there is a serious movement to discourage and ban any AI from creative work. But I need to confess this: I do use AI (in my case, Gemini) to proofread what I post here.

The prompt I use is this: “Please edit the following for typos:” and then I paste in what I have written. I review the corrections, and then that is what I post.

Hence, my work here has em dashes. Which, based on my casual reading on the subject, means some people will refuse to read absolutely anything I post with said punctuation mark.

As someone who worked for many years in publishing, I realized long ago that grammar and punctuation were not my strong suit. In fact, in the poetry I write, I use almost no punctuation at all precisely because I have no patience for punctuation. Instead, I rely on line breaks and white space to tell the reader where to pause.

So today I am confessing. Since I am unable to proofread my own work well enough, I am going to rely on Gemini and AI to fix my grammar and punctuation for the foreseeable future. And if that bothers you, you can just stick to reading my poetry.