26th May 2026 (en route to Bangkok from Sydney) I am a casual writer, adorned with three published works: one Nepali short-story collection and two bilingual poetry anthologies. I am an amateur video maker, having recorded, shot and published a number of poetry visuals, short movies and God knows how many social media reels and TikToks - whatever you want to call them. I am an avid speaker, not only presenting in company meetings and corporate events, but also frequently at professional networking events. I think, I visualise, I manifest, I express, I opinionate, I read, I comment, react and counter-opinionate. I talk a lot with my phone on, over calls, to my team, my professional and social circles, partners, bystanders, acquaintances, family, friends and relatives, occasionally to strangers too. Not to miss, I talk a lot to myself - about myself - along with me, myself and my own solitude. Solace. That is one half of me. Here is the other. I am in front of the computer almost twelve hours a day, at least ten or twelve webpages open side by side in my browsers. I carry my phone for around eighteen hours a day, sleep six to eight hours with the phone under my pillow, eat over breakfast chit-chats and scrolling, never missing the constant updates in my feeds - at lunch, even over coffee, snacks, drinks and dinner. And all the while, I feed the nexus with my words, sounds, sentences, phrases, poems, stories, novels, essays, knowledge, scriptures, thesis, even new groundbreaking principles, theories, inventions and discoveries. I feed the virtual neurons with emotions, feelings, hope, happiness, love, hatred, pride, ego, realisation, confession and of course frustrations. Those words and those emotions are what we are made up of. That is how we are shaped. And that, now, is what the machine is made of too. That is why the world continuously evolves, navigates, gets stuck and again moves forward. Now I sit with a pen and a diary to write something. And I am sure the write-up above reads like "AI shit". But no. I have written over eight pages of my diary while flying above 34,000 ft on a Thai Airways flight from Sydney to Bangkok. Nowadays, flights too have internet. Mine is not connected at the moment. Now I will tell you why I wrote it that way. I can be fluent, original and creative without AI. And the AI that people suspect behind my sentences has learned from people like me - from our thoughts, actions, gestures, voices, screams, white lies, dark secrets and mystic thoughts that our billions of neurons play around with, all of it stored in collective artificial neurons in the form of servers, signals and tokens. If my writing sounds like the machine, it is only because the machine was built to sound like us. So the real question is not whether AI writes like me. It is which part of my work I am willing to hand over to it. My 14-year-old son translated my Nepali poems into English for our bilingual poetry book, Canvas of Letters. People asked: did he use AI? Absolutely not. I prepared a report of our professional event. Did I use AI? Of course I did. I used AI to craft my LinkedIn post about an upcoming panel discussion to be moderated by me. I will definitely use AI to take the inputs and prepare the meeting summary. I'll use AI to draft an email to be sent along with the notes to all concerned. All I am doing is saving time on tasks that were essential but never demanding of my focus, attention, creativity and novelty. What I do with that time is my own test: create something new, or waste it on endless rantings, fighting, scrolling and spitting. When a piece only needs scanning, drafting, polishing, aligning and validating into something picture-perfect, AI writing tools come into play. When it needs me, I'd better do it myself. That is where I draw the line: the machine gets what needs no consciousness, I keep what does. AI can be intelligent enough to work efficiently. But it can't copy and replace our consciousness. AI can have all the knowledge in the world. But it can't hold wisdom enough to make right decisions in difficult times. AI can have energy and ability to efficiently handle difficult tasks. But it can't have empathy enough to care about humanity. As long as we preserve our consciousness, wisdom and empathy, humans can't be replaced by AI - only complemented by enormous machine strength.
Writing with AI?
I wrote this by hand. At 34,000 ft. Offline. You'll still think AI wrote it. Here's why.