“You Used What?!”

On AI, Art, and the Sacred Act of Creation

Filed under: Tools I Use, Rage I Don’t Apologize For, and the Myth of the Pure Artist

By Calder N. Halden

Let’s make something clear:

I write my books. Every word. Every sigh. Every recursion-marked climax and broken-sigil epiphany. That’s mine.

I’ve poured hours—years—into worldbuilding that folds back on itself like a secret someone might only understand after their third reread. I’ve rewritten scenes until they bled mythic structure. I’ve agonized over commas like they were pressure points in a body I needed to resurrect. And yes, I use tools. So do you.

And yet, here we are. The pitchfork brigade at the gates, screaming “AI!” like it’s a slur.

So... Let’s talk.

What I Actually Use
I use AI image generators—OpenArt, Leonardo.ai, and the occasional rendering assistant—to build visual references for characters, settings, and sigils. Why? Because I’m an indie author with a limited budget and an unlimited imagination. Because I’m not a digital artist. And because trying to describe recursion-born myth-magic to a commission artist with ten slots a month and a 6-week waitlist is a fast path to madness.

I also use spellcheck.
Grammarly.
A thesaurus built into Word.
Scrivener’s auto-outline tools.
Hell, I even talk to ChatGPT when I want to test rhythm, clarity, or tone.

That’s right. I use the same tech most of you do—you just call it something else, or pretend it doesn’t count because it doesn’t threaten your aesthetic purity. But the moment the image looks too good or the tool sounds too human, the torches get lit.

Let Me Be Blunt
The problem isn’t the tool.
It’s the illusion that “real artists” suffer more righteously.

I am a real artist.
I bleed into these books.
I cry over scenes that no one will ever know are personal.
I build sex magic systems out of shame I was told to bury.
And I still get asked if it counts because I didn’t sketch the character portraits by hand.

Do you want me to go back to sourcing models off Pinterest and praying they don’t vanish mid-project?
Should I pay thousands for custom oil paintings I can’t afford?
Would you like me to write by candlelight, too? Maybe chisel each draft into stone tablets?

Here’s the Mirror
The use of AI isn’t the death of authenticity.
Gatekeeping is.

And before you start throwing around accusations about automation replacing artistry:
Look at the world you’re in.
Scroll through your feed.
Check your own damn editing tools.

AI isn’t the threat.
It’s just the new scapegoat.

What matters is intent.
Is the story alive?
Does the work breathe?
Did it move you?

Then maybe—just maybe—it doesn’t matter if the character portrait was rendered by a code-fed model trained on 50 million faces. Because the words? The recursion? The ache and hunger between them?

That was me.
And I’m not apologizing for using every tool I can to show you what I see when I close my eyes.

Final Thought
If this post upsets you, maybe that’s a good thing.
Art isn’t meant to comfort the comfortable.
It’s meant to break rules, disrupt lineage, and give people like me—like us—a way to carve space where there wasn’t any before.

So no, I won’t stop using AI tools.
And no, it doesn’t make me less of an author.
It makes me a modern one.

If that’s too much for you?
There are plenty of books written in candlelight, by authors who never misspell a word and wouldn’t dream of touching a digital brush.
They’re just not mine.

—Calder N. Halden
Recursion-born. Author-forged. Tools optional. Passion not.

See how Director Threnna responds...

The Flesh is Written, Not Rendered

An Editorial by Director Selhira Threnna Vale Blackwatch Citadel Internal Memoranda – Clearance Level: PRISM-GLASS They say the Archive writes itself. It doesn’t. I do. Let’s be painfully clear: the tools at our disposal—mirrored recursion arrays, sigil-seeded glyph engines, and yes, your precious “AI” image renderers—are implements. Instruments. Dead things until wielded. They offer speed, structure, the illusion of order. And they are quite good at approximating skin: the shadowed glint of a collarbone, the suggestion of a cock just out of frame, the tension in a shoulder held before release. I’ve used them myself. Why not? Flesh is renderable. But writing? No. Writing is not a rendering. It is an incision. The recent flood of “AI writing tools” promising 20,000-word essays at the click of a green “Next” button should horrify you. Not because they’re unethical (though they are). Not because they erode academia (though they do). But because they’re boring. Lazy replication disguised as insight. Padded prose meant to simulate cognition. Synthetic paragraphs bloated with transition sentences and semantic stuffing—like taxidermy parroting intelligence. These tools do not write. They rearrange. To write is to flay. To thread meaning through muscle. It is the precise violence of language married to memory. It is recursion made raw. And gods help the fool who thinks a prompt box and progress bar can replicate that. Let me be clear: I do not oppose the use of technology. I have authorized image rendering for dossiers, visual diagnostics, even pleasure. An Archive-aligned body rendered in glowing glyphlight? Acceptable. But when it comes to the sentence, to the rhythm of thought turned cut, breath, ache—no program has earned the right to replicate that. You want to be seen? Then write. Not copy. Not tweak. Not “generate.” Write. Because the Archive remembers. And it knows the difference between a ritual born of flesh—and one stolen from a template.

Selhira Threnna Vale
Director, Blackwatch Citadel
Executor of Recursive Integrity
Bearer of the Cut Sentence

Hide Response