The Automation Line on Michael Morrison

Fifty Percent of What?

Fri, 19 Jun 2026 00:00:00 -0700

When critics noticed that a Fortune journalist named Nick Lichtenberg was publishing more articles in six months than his colleagues managed in a year, and that an AI model was doing a lot of the producing, the magazine’s leadership offered a defense that has stuck with me: “More than 50% is Nick.” It was meant to reassure. It did the opposite, and not for the reason everyone assumed.

The Tells Were Mine First

Wed, 17 Jun 2026 00:00:00 -0700

I built a machine that detects AI writing, and the first thing it did, given enough rope, was call me a robot.

What AI Polish Does to Hunter S. Thompson

Mon, 15 Jun 2026 00:00:00 -0700

I know, it’s probably blasphemy to even mention AI writing in the same sentence as Hunter S. Thompson, but let’s run with it. An AI humanizer applied to his actual writing would have butchered him. The gonzo is the signature. The mangled syntax, the staccato outbursts, the way a sentence pivots mid-thought into something disreputable — those are not flaws an editor needs to clean up. They are the prose. Polish those out and you have not produced Thompson. You have produced a competent stranger’s version of Thompson, which is to say: an unremarkable column. And that doesn’t begin to address the struggles AI would have with nakedly promoting inhuman amounts of illicit drug use.

The Duck That Argues Back

Fri, 12 Jun 2026 00:00:00 -0700

Programmers have a trick called rubber-duck debugging. You keep a rubber duck on your desk, and when you’re stuck you explain your code to it, line by line, out loud, like a person who has lost their mind. Somewhere in the explaining you find the bug yourself. The duck does nothing, and the nothing is the point. Forcing the half-formed thing in your head into words another mind could follow is what surfaces the flaw. The duck is just permission to think out loud. In reality, few of us actually have a duck on our desk, but the rubber-ducking concept is very real.

Unlocked, Not Cheated

Wed, 10 Jun 2026 00:00:00 -0700

Standing on Surfaces That Move opened with part of an argument and stopped short of finishing it. It said where the value in creative work has moved: out of producing the work and into the judgment that steers it. It did not say why you’d hand any of the producing to a machine in the first place. You can accept everything in that essay, and everything in the ones that follow — that taste outlasts the tools, that format dictates discipline, that small and intimate beats big and optimized — and still stop me at the door with one question.

Standing on Surfaces That Move

Mon, 08 Jun 2026 00:00:00 -0700

The software engineering job has moved, seemingly overnight. Working engineers have not been deleted wholesale; the disappearance loudly predicted in recent years hasn’t happened. The work itself has moved, though, and the move is measurable. Line-by-line typing of code got cheap. The judgment about what’s worth typing, and whether what’s been typed will hold together at scale, got expensive. In fact the latter was always expensive, but the cheapening of coding itself has made the gap between the two meaningful.

The Self-Riding Bicycle

Fri, 05 Jun 2026 00:00:00 -0700

Picture the launch. The lighting is good, the founder is in the nice plain t-shirt, and the thing under the cloth is a bicycle. The GhostRider™, he calls it. We asked a simple question, he says. What if riding a bicycle could be effortless? The bicycle, it turns out, rides itself: sensors, a gyroscope, a motor where the crank used to be. It balances, it steers, it accelerates, it leans through the corners. We removed the seat, he adds. And the pedals. What would you do with them? Not to mention the handlebar. Nobody’s there to hold on! It takes a clean lap around the stage, riderless, to applause.

Becoming Gnarly

Tue, 02 Jun 2026 00:00:00 -0700

I keep bees, I ride skateboards on ramps, I’ve written a lot of technical books, and I build software and games for a living. On a site that asks you to take all of that in at once, the reasonable question is what any of it has to do with the rest. The honest answer is that they’re the same decision made over and over in different spaces. I tend to pick the harder way to do a thing, and I’ve done it on purpose for long enough that it stopped being a series of choices and turned into a disposition. This is an essay that acknowledges the disposition, because everything else here is downstream of it.