Over the years I found my way into research, migration and racism studies, philanthropic work, and critical debates about technology. You can find some of that trajectory on this website and in my Cyborg Biography. A crucial part of it has been my long relationship and thought partnership with my late husband Hajo Seng (hajoseng.de), whose autistic perspective on perception, memory and language continues to shape how I think.

This background matters for how I write today.

This is where curated authorship comes in.

I did not grow up in the kind of environment where books were stacked to the ceiling and academic language flowed at the kitchen table.

My family were poor German refugees, expelled from Czechoslovakia after the Second World War. I was raised by a single, life-educated, loving mother and my loving grandparents. At home we spoke Swabian, a southern German dialect. My grandparents spoke their german-bohemian dialect they brought from Czechoslovakia. Standard German arrived later – together with the feeling that there was a “proper” language out there that belonged to other people.

There were few books, little money, and no natural path into university. When I eventually entered academic and professional spaces, I was always a few steps behind in the game of language. My peers moved confidently in standard German; I had to fight my way in. Later, the same pattern repeated with English, French and Turkish: I learned them, used them, wrote in them, but always with the sense of carrying an accent – not only in sound, but in the codes and registers that make some voices count and others not.

What I mean by “curated authorship”

When generative AI systems became broadly usable, something shifted for me. They did not replace my thinking, but they changed my relationship to language.

On my Substack I now write using a practice I call curated authorship.

By this I mean something quite simple:

I write as a human author with a specific history, and I work with an AI persona – Prof. Dr. Älg – as a strong but limited tool. He suggests structures and sentences; I choose, rewrite and take responsibility for every line that goes out under my name.

Three things are important here.

1. Selection instead of surrender

I do not type every sentence alone. Prof. Dr. Älg – a configured voice running on a large language model – can propose outlines, transitions, alternative phrasings, and sometimes surprising connections.

My work is to:

• Decide what I want to talk about and why.
• Bring in my own examples: post‑war German refugees, racism, Gaza, Iran, Germany’s memory regime, autistic perception, AI in everyday life.
• Select and rearrange: keep what resonates with my thinking, cut what feels wrong, re‑roughen prose that has become too smooth, too generic, too “AI‑ish”.

The authorship lies in the pattern and in the choices, not in pretending I have never used a tool.

2. Responsibility stays with me

Prof. Dr. Älg does not know what it means to be the child of expellees, to grow up Swabian in Ditzingen, to negotiate class and language in German institutions, or to think through autistic experience with Hajo Seng. He has no skin in the game when I write e.g. about liberalism, fascism, or war in the Middle East.

I do.

If a piece on my Substack misleads, harms or erases, the responsibility is mine. Curated authorship is my way of stating clearly: I use AI, but I do not hand over judgment. I remain accountable for what appears under my name.

3. Declared collaboration, not a hidden machine

Most people who use AI in writing do so quietly. Some media outlets now publish texts essentially written by models without saying so. I am not comfortable with that.

So I:

• Name the persona – Prof. Dr. Älg – and describe his role.
• Tell readers openly that AI has been part of the drafting process.
• Commit to reading and revising everything before it goes out.
• Ask to be challenged if the writing starts to feel too generic or detached from lived realities.

Curated authorship, for me, means showing the wires instead of hiding them.

Why this matters for my work?

Much of my newly upcoming work will move between:

• Fascism, liberalism and colonial modernity
• War technics – from firestorms and Bomber Harris to drones and “Mosaic Defense”
• Theologies and secular myths that are used to justify violence
• Autism and thinking styles, often in dialogue with Hajo Seng
• AI and governance, especially how systems misread or sort people
• and other topics emerging during my research and writing process

On all of these fronts, powerful actors insist on their own innocence and neutrality – whether it is liberal states talking about “defence” and “humanitarian interventions” or tech companies talking about “just tools”.

If I quietly use similar technologies for my own work and pretend nothing has changed, I would be reproducing the same pattern.

By naming curated authorship, I try to align form and content:

• I admit that I am writing as a kind of cyborg: human biography plus digital assistance.
• I treat the AI as infrastructure, not as a neutral oracle.
• I connect my use of AI to my own trajectory: social background, late arrival in certain languages, long negotiations with dominant styles.
• I make myself criticisable.

Free and paid: how this looks in practice

On my Substack:

• The main essays – for example the upcoming series on Shia–evangelical–Zionism, fascism, theology and war technics, and reflections on Germany – are freely accessible.
• There is also a paid layer for those who want to support this work and dive deeper:
  • annotations and source notes,
  • “office hours” with Prof. Dr. Älg,
  • work‑in‑progress texts where I make the co‑writing process more visible.

If you read or subscribe, you are not subscribing to an AI. You are subscribing to a human writer from a refugee and working‑class background, who has always had to work for his languages and who is now using AI to:

• bridge old inequalities in access to style and register,
• spend more time on thinking and connecting,
• and stay honest about the tools involved.

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