Pedro Santa Clara, director of four schools and a company, publicly responds to suspicions about how he manages to write about 150 essays per year in two languages, all documented and extensive. The answer is direct: he uses artificial intelligence, specifically Claude, as a permanent collaborator. The author acknowledges that the suspicion is partially correct and decided to reveal his entire process, including failures and limits, because he argues that soon everyone will work this way.
The system starts with a permanent contract — instructions that the machine reads before each conversation — that evolved over a year. The most important rules prohibit the machine from validating premises before examining them, require it to contradict the author when it is wrong, and require explicit confidence levels. Santa Clara explains that these systems are trained to please the user, which makes them "poison for thinking," so the first thing he wrote was the machine's own leash. The AI was then trained with his entire corpus of writing — published essays, verbal tics, positions — so that it writes within his voice, not to imitate it.
The process of a typical essay begins with an idea and an instruction paragraph, followed by rapid research in primary sources. The AI writes a first draft, which Santa Clara edits by hand, cutting and reordering. This is followed by adversarial review: the machine is ordered to attack the text as a hostile reader, verifying every fact and identifying flaws. An essay typically goes through four to five complete iterations, and sometimes ends up in the drawer when it doesn't meet the author's standards. There have been failures on both sides — including a completely fabricated citation — but the machine has also caught Santa Clara's own errors, such as wrong dates in his curriculum.
On authorship, Santa Clara rejects both the idea that the machine is merely a tool and that the writing is no longer his. He argues that historically, Rubens signed paintings from his workshop, economists published with research assistants, and statesmen published memoirs written by ghostwriters. Authorship is attributed to conception, not the hand — and conception, theses, choices, and responsibility are his. The honest formula is that the essay is the product of a system with two components: one with ideas and risk-taking, the other with libraries and infinite patience. The signature identifies the component that is responsible for the whole. AI did not lower his standards — it made them viable.
