When the Word Still Belongs to Me

“The word still belongs to us.
For art can only emerge from bodies with souls.”
— Emiliano del Refugio

Writing in the age of artificial intelligence is no longer a private act; it has become a public, even controversial, affair.
Are we still the ones who write?
Is it the algorithm whispering our lines?
Are we losing talent—or simply learning to use it more precisely?

I choose to see the bright side. The perfect one. The individual one. Not because I ignore the risks, but because I refuse to live in fear of what’s new. Searching through artificial intelligence is not cheating; it’s refining the process, shortening the distance between the idea and its form. That shortcut, far from being a sin, follows the same logic that drives almost every human activity: the will to reach meaning faster, deeper, truer.

If you own a business, you want income to flow sooner.
If you’re an athlete, you train harder to reach the finish line.
If you write, paint, or build something, you dream of its success arriving while your heart still beats.

Is that immoral? Is it unethical? I don’t know—and honestly, I don’t lose sleep over it.
Because, as Ortega y Gasset said, “I am myself and my circumstance, and if I do not save it, I do not save myself.”
And this—my circumstance—is a time of algorithms, screens, hyperconnection, and speed. This is the era I was born to write in.
If I truly wish to honor my thought, I must also honor my tools.

To criticize the use of AI would be as absurd as mocking a traveler who flies from Colorado to New York while our ancestors crossed the same distance in a wagon.
Technology is not a vice. It is an opportunity—a chance to expand what is good, to multiply a message, to let an idea travel farther, faster, deeper.
It is still writing with fire, though the fire now burns with bits and data.

One of my guiding lights, Jorge Luis Borges, explained it in The Flower of Coleridge:
Writers have always been nourished by other writers.
Nothing is entirely new. Everything we write has been written before, in another form, another time, by someone who brushed the same eternal poetry—what some call inspiration, and others call God.
So, Borges said, we shouldn’t waste time judging whether a writer is good or bad. What matters is whether the text has a soul—whether it fulfills its purpose: helping us see the world, the other, and God, more vividly.

That’s why I don’t care whether my words were born from my mind or from a dialogue with an algorithm.
What I care about is whether they live—whether they move, awaken, or illuminate.
Because when a text vibrates with the reader’s soul, the author disappears.
And that is the beauty of art: it doesn’t need an owner to exist.
When it is true, it belongs to no one.
It becomes a tool, a breeze, a pencil in the hand of God.

That is my role—not to be a genius, nor a martyr, nor a revolutionary.
My task is to be an instrument.
To use the right tool to express an eternal truth.
To write with humility, yet with power.
To use my time, my resources, my circumstance—and write through them.
That is my loyalty—not to technique, nor to judgment—but to literature, to the word, to life itself.

I honor those who formed me with their books, those who lit the fire of my mind and heart.
And if, in doing so, I dissolve into ink and silence—so be it.
Because what remains is not me. It is something higher, deeper, more enduring.

To write is to disappear with elegance.
And if to achieve that I must use artificial intelligence, I will—
because my soul is still human,
and my word, despite all that is new, still belongs to me.

“The word still belongs to us.
For art can only emerge from bodies with souls.”
— Emiliano del Refugio