The Yin-Yang on My Wrist Is Now My Writing Philosophy

I have a friend who is deeply, almost professionally, skeptical of AI-written content.

For months, every time I shared a new post, he would squint at it and say: “That sounds like AI.” Sometimes he was right. Sometimes he wasn’t. But he always had a verdict.

A few weeks ago, he stopped saying it.

Not because he stopped reading. He just couldn’t tell anymore.

That was the moment I knew something had shifted.

Two years before that conversation, my wife and I got matching tattoos in Bali. Half a yin-yang each. The idea at the time was simple: the universe moves toward equilibrium. Every act, even one that seems random, is just a course correction. The black contains a dot of white. The white contains a dot of black. Neither is purely itself.

Matching yin-yang tattoos — This photo was taken right after we removed the film off of our tattoos. Bali, Jan 4, 2023

I didn’t expect to find that same idea inside my writing process in 2025.

But here we are.

What actually happens when I write

Most people imagine AI writing like this: you type a prompt, a machine spits out text, you hit publish.

That is not what happens here.

What actually happens is closer to this: I show up with an idea. A half-formed one, usually. Something I’ve been thinking about, something that happened, something a client said that stuck with me.

Then that idea goes through a process. Not my process. Our process.

Human and AI shaping an idea together

There are benchmarks for what good writing looks like in my voice. There are structural patterns that have worked before. There’s a documented understanding of who reads my work and what they actually need from it. The AI holds all of that. It runs the idea through that lens. It asks the questions I should be asking but am too close to the material to ask myself.

Meanwhile, I’m thinking about the strategy. The angle. What this piece is actually trying to do. What the reader should feel at the end of it that they didn’t feel at the beginning. That’s where my brain goes.

The AI handles the operational layer. I handle the thinking layer.

Neither of us is writing alone.

Why this is harder than writing alone

Here’s what I didn’t expect: this process takes more effort, not less.

Writing the LinkedIn post that accompanied this article took an entire session of back and forth. I rejected suggestions. I rewrote the hook myself. I corrected assumptions about my own process when the AI invented details that weren’t true. I pushed back when a new paragraph diluted the ending.

Revision notes and feedback between human and AI

By the time we were done, I had written more words in feedback than the post itself contained.

That’s not a shortcut. That’s a different kind of work.

What it trades is execution effort for thinking effort. The drafting, the structural scaffolding, the “does this paragraph belong here?” decisions, those happen faster. But the judgment calls, the voice corrections, the “no, that’s not what actually happened,” those are all mine. They have to be.

If you hand that part to the machine, you don’t get your writing back. You get content.

The friend test, revisited

My skeptical friend didn’t stop noticing because the AI got better at faking my voice.

He stopped noticing because there is less and less of a fake version to detect.

The posts that used to read like AI were the ones where I stepped back too far. Where I let the machine make the meaning and I just approved the output. Those posts had the right words in roughly the right order, but they had no fingerprints on them.

The posts that read like me are the ones where I stayed in the loop at every step. Where the friction between my judgment and the AI’s draft produced something neither of us would have written alone.

That friction is not a bug. It’s the whole mechanism.

What this has to do with a tattoo

The yin-yang doesn’t mean balance in the sense of stillness. Two equal halves, perfectly at rest.

It means two forces in motion, each containing a trace of the other. The system is always moving. Always correcting. Always heading somewhere neither half could reach on its own.

Human and AI in balance around a yin-yang symbol

That is exactly what this writing process feels like on a good day.

A little AI in everything I write. A little of me in everything the AI produces. The line between them gets harder to find with every session. Not because one is disappearing into the other, but because together they’re becoming something more coherent than either alone.

Human in the loop isn’t a safety net.

It’s the whole point.

Yes, I used AI to help write this. I also spent more words giving feedback, corrections, and direction than the post itself contains. Whether that makes it “AI writing” or “my writing,” I’ll leave for you to decide.

Where do you draw that line?