On My Writing Process (How I write these daily Meditations)

Every  now and again someone will run one of my posts through one of those AI checkers and say, "You used AI to write 43% of your article."   I usually just laugh.  Because that's not what I do.  But recently, Substack, has introduced a "tool" that will allow anyone to check anything they read with an AI-detector.  

So, do I use any AI in my process?  Sure. But not the way you might think.  

So this morning, as I wrote my daily meditation, I decided to detail my entire process with screen shots, pictures, and proof.  Here's how I do what I do. 

I begin with Lectio Divina.  I'm not going to detail the process here. I've talked about it before, and you can look it up.  But it's a prayerful and meditative approach to reading a text of Scripture or another spiritual writing.  A part of my process includes journaling by hand.  Yes, I begin each meditation by writing something out by hand.  Here it was today:

After that, I DO use AI.  Not to generate anything, but simply to transliterate my handwriting into actual text. It saves me the painstaking effort of having to re-type everything. 

This is what it produced:

After that, I copy/paste the text into a Word Processor.  I fix the errors it made as I go. I reorganize the content into sections (the original journal is more stream-of-consciousness), add some introductory material, the practical advice at the end, and supplement it with additional research.

You can see here how I'm working from one window (the Word Processor) with Logos (where I look at the original language, commentaries, and what my library on Logos can add) as well as the Cantena Bible App (which provides Church Fathers quotes for any verse of the Bible I'm looking at).   

I also consult my other books/sources, my study Bible, etc.  My desk is a perpetual mess. 

I add quotes, additional insights I gleaned from my sources, etc.  When the final post is ready, I send it back to Gemini and ask, "Please scan this post for any typos or grammatical errors."  I made the corrections in my Word document.

I find an image for my post to put on my website/Substack.  Yes, sometimes I ask Gemini to create an image that fits. Sometimes I scour the Internet looking for what fits. But I don't want to spend a lot of time doing this.  It's just a quick visual that usually picks up on the introductory image or (in the case of this post) the image of the surgeon using a spoon that I used in my meditation. 

Then I take my final post to my e-mail provider, I give it another read, format the section headings and block quotes, tweaking it a little more. 

I post the same content to my website and Substack.

Then I send it out.  

Today's post (based on the AI scanner on Substack) showed 100% human generated content.  Yeterday's showed something of a split for some reason. But this is my process.  And it is not AI-generated.  It starts with prayer, is written first by hand, then expanded and modified.