The new imposter syndrome.

You use AI to do great work. Then someone calls it AI slop. And instead of brushing it off, part of you wonders if they're right.

I wrote a long article last week. Detailed. Personal. Documented every failure, every mistake, every restart. Spent a week on it. It's the most honest thing I've published.

And I got a comment on the post, calling it AI slop.

And I can't fully dismiss that. Because I did use AI while writing it. I use AI for almost everything now. It helps me organize my thinking, draft faster, find the version I actually mean. I built everything I wrote about. I made every decision. I sat with the blank page and figured out what the story actually was. But the tools shaped the output, and I can't fully understand where my thinking ends and the AI's phrasing begins.

That's uncomfortable to admit. But pretending otherwise would be dishonest, and the whole point of the article was honesty.

But I can't get past one thing.

In the good old days, imposter syndrome was "do I deserve to be here." You'd do good work and still feel like a fraud. This new version is different. It's "did I actually make this, or did I just prompt it into existence." And it hits harder because there's no clean answer. The work is real. The hours are real. The mistakes were definitely, painfully mine. But the medium has changed, and people's trust hasn't caught up. Including my own trust in my own work.

There's a new layer: even if you know the work was real, will anyone believe you? And at what point do you stop caring whether they do?

I don't have an answer. I think this is just what making things feels like now. You use the best tools available, you do the work, and you sit with the ambiguity of not being able to prove which parts were "really" yours.

Maybe that's fine. Maybe authorship was always messier than we pretended.