What a sad reality.

Honestly, the accusations “You used AI” or “Why did you use AI?” feel like a luxury debate to me. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: I don’t care if someone uses AI in their writing. I use AI in mine.

What I care about is whether I can still hear your voice. Whether I can still feel you in the writing.

As an African woman from a country where many women don’t even believe their thoughts deserve global attention partly because they struggle to find the “right” words in a colonial language, I cannot dismiss tools like ChatGPT so casually. For some of us, these tools are not shortcuts. They are bridges.

Our minds were shaped in African languages. Then we were forced to translate ourselves into colonial ones. That translation is not neutral. It is exhausting. It distorts. It delays. It sometimes silences.

So when AI helps refine wording in a language that was never ours to begin with, I don’t see cheating. I see assistance. I see access. I see acceleration.

Until the so-called “AI police” understand what it means to have your mother tongue treated as unfit for global discourse and to constantly translate your thoughts from one linguistic structure into another, their moral outrage doesn’t move me.

This isn’t about laziness. It’s about historical asymmetry. And context matters.