I wouldn’t be a very reliable correspondent in reporting on my experiences with AI if I didn’t crawl into the metaphorical trenches and actually, you know, experience AI.

In that light I spent a good portion of the day prior to writing this post installing Ollama^[1], a piece of open source software in which it is possible to care for and interact with AI models downloaded directly onto your own home computer. 

Ollama behaves pretty much like a bot one might find online on sites like ChatGPT^[2] or Anthropic’s Claude^[3], and in fact use some of the same foundational models, but because it is limited by the hardware you own—and, for contextual perspective, I was running Ollama on a 2025 Macbook M5 Pro laptop computer with base specs—my experience was decidedly slower than using any web-based model.

All that is to say I was playing around, chatting with different models, burning through three battery cycles and (suspicious as I am about uploading either my fiction or my bloggy writing to public AI models) was a little more willing to put a bunch of my writing into models contained to the confines of my own computer.

The algorithm was full of feedback, of course. 

I mean, no really, of course it was: I literally asked it to give me feedback. I pasted some recent writing and asked it to look for stylistic improvements. I asked it to tell me if my articles made sense, if my prose was clear, and if my points were well articulated.

And of course the model did exactly what I suspected all along that it would do: it smoothed out the rough edges. It offered suggestions that to me, a guy who has been writing on raw instinct for nearly fifty years while clinging to an ineffable style vibe I have honed through those decades of practice, were identity-stripping. It cleaned up my grammar, sure, and I dare not suggest I am some sort of Picasso of the written word or a modern day Shakespeare here, but I also can pry away my own modesty long enough to suggest that I am a human who leaves unique tool marks in the flow of what I write.

That’s the real rub, isn’t it? It took me a few hours to get a private AI set up on my laptop and it has become damn near frictionless to the point that—sitting here in a cafe—I have my own personal AI writing assistant purring under my fingertips… but all it seems to be doing right now is destroying my battery and sanding down the fingerprints and rough edges of my personal style.

And PS. I ignored every bit of it’s advice and stuck with my gut.