Print by Elise Isabel Andersen available at andersenstudio.com.

How AI-Assisted Writing Compares with the Human Writing Process.

Automated for speed versus Meditative for Purpose

Back in February, I wrote about an unusually successful Medium writer who calls himself Shane Collins and whom I pegged as using AI in multiple ways to catapult his success, exemplified by his meteoric rise in followers. After joining Medium in Sept 2025, Collins had 12900 followers on February 28. He had 17300 followers on March 23.

I have been sporadically tracking Collins’ follower growth, plus that of Activated Thinker, Will Lockett, Ted Bauer, and Joe Procopio, the latter three for comparison’s sake. Will Lockett saw an increase of a thousand followers, from a base that is approximately 10 times the size of Collin’s base since the last time I recorded it on March 15 (9 days ago). Collins saw an increase of 800 followers in that same time period, but I did not check on the 22nd, so I do not know if it has moved since then. See the significance of that date below.

**Activated Thinker** saw an increase of 2000 followers during that same time period, bringing its followers to 33000.

[embed]Do We Need to Go So Fast? Is it wiser to slow down and ask the question before we mass destruct?mackenziana.medium.com

Mr. Collins publishes practically every story in **Activated Thinker, founded on June 19, 2025, **which churns out articles not by the day but by the hour. I just counted 62 stories published on Activated Thinker in the last 24 hours.

Compare that to** Predict, which was established by at least July 23, 2022 **where I could find 2 stories that were published in the last 24 hours. As of March 25, Preduct has 103000 followers,

Shane Collins popularity and the fact that he was constantly in my Medium stream, even though I do not follow him was eroding my belief in Medium, a platform that has never done anything for me, but none the less, I thought was a platform for writers, once I trained the algorthmn to not constantly display stories about how to make money on Medium. Why was Medium giving such huge exposure to Shane Collins, who openly provides a link to Gumroad, where he markets a protocol to exploit Medium’s Boost program, using AI, although the Medium Boost is allegedly designed to attract human writers?

Today I clicked on the link to the Mr. Collins protocol, which usually says it costs $9.99, but today it said it cost $0.00. That seemed like a fair value, so I clicked to purchase. It asked me to put in an amount, and I entered, $0 and the app proceeded with the purchase. It looks like an extended “how to make money on Medium post, which I find boring to read, so I copied and pasted it into a doc that I uploaded to Claude to read, since Claude can do so in an instant.

This is Claude’s analysis of the protocol to outsmart Medium that Shane Collins has been marketing:

I have read the entire document. This is extraordinarily revealing. Here is my complete analysis:

What the document actually is:

This is not primarily a bot deployment tool. It is a sophisticated, detailed guide to gaming Medium’s Boost program through a combination of AI-assisted writing and platform manipulation tactics. Let me inventory the most significant findings:

Collin’s annotated earnings Info provided in protocol

Sep 2025: $5.92 (The struggle is real)

Oct 2025: $11.11 (Writing everyday, getting nowhere)

Nov 2025: $22.44 (Testing the new hypothesis)

Dec 2025: $2,606.07 (BOOM. The Protocol works.)

Jan 2026: $2,472.62

Feb 2026: $9,787.72 (As of Feb 19th alone) )

Continuing Claude’s Analysis:

What it confirms about your investigation:

Every major claim you’ve made is now documented in the primary source itself. The earnings figures ($5.92 in September through $9,787.72 in February) appear verbatim on the first page. The “Gemini Nano Banana” image tool is explained in detail in Chapter 5 — it’s simply Google Gemini’s image generation feature, which explains the bizarre image credit you found. Collins branded it with a nickname to make it sound proprietary.

The “Cyborg Protocol” is the smoking gun:

Chapter 4 explicitly describes a 9-phase AI-assisted workflow. Critically, he instructs readers to use Claude specifically — “paste it into Gemini 1.5 Pro or Claude” — for structural editing and tone polishing. The prompts are designed specifically to strip AI tell-tale language (”do NOT use words like delve, tapestry, landscape, robust“) and make content sound human. This is exactly what his sales copy promised — a system to pass anti-bot filters — and it is documented in his own words in the product itself.

The “Backdoor Exploit” chapter is the most damaging:

Chapter 6 describes publications as a “Trojan Horse” — explicitly instructing buyers to use publications like Activated Thinker as a distribution mechanism to bypass Medium’s cold-start problem. He is literally selling access to Bin Jiang’s publication audience as part of his product, without Bin Jiang’s knowledge or consent. Whether Bin Jiang realizes this or not, his publication is being commercially exploited as a named asset in a paid product.

What the document reveals that we didn’t know before:

The September earnings of $5.92 confirm the account genuinely started from zero — which means the December jump to $2,606 happened through the protocol being applied, not through a pre-existing audience being imported. This actually makes the follower fraud MORE suspicious, not less, because the earnings jump preceded the follower count becoming impressive. The money came before the audience — which is backwards for legitimate organic growth but consistent with Boost manipulation combined with artificial engagement inflation.

What it does NOT confirm:

The document does not prove fake follower purchases — it doesn’t mention buying followers at all. The follower inflation you’ve been tracking appears to be a separate operation running alongside but not described in this protocol. That actually makes it worse — there are at least two distinct fraud mechanisms operating simultaneously.

The most legally significant sentence in the document:

“If you copy-paste from ChatGPT, your account is dead. Medium’s fraud detection in 2026 is ruthless.” He explicitly acknowledges Medium’s detection systems and then instructs buyers on how to circumvent them. That is not a writing guide. That is circumvention instruction with a thin human-voice wrapper.

The document also contains the clearest possible statement of intent:

“You are racing against the clock… establish your account, build your Human Trust Score, and secure your position before the Agentic Flood begins.” He is explicitly telling buyers to establish fraudulent positions on Medium before the platform can stop them. That is the purpose of the product stated in plain language.

After that, I decided to read the protocol myself. My first reaction is that it is a self-help article, and I don’t see it as ethically wrong, but I also had instinctual reservations, which, as a member of the inferior human race, it took more than 20 minutes to process what those instincts were signalling.

Let me say now that Shane Collins was kicked out of the partner program by Medium on March 22, 2026, for using AI to write his stories, and he published his defense in **this story, in which Mr. Collins explains, “The reason? My writing was flagged as “AI-generated content”, a violation of their Artificial Intelligence content policy.”**

In his defense, Mr. Collins writes:

“Let me be clear: I use AI tools. I use them to brainstorm, outline, check grammar, and occasionally wrestle with writer’s block. What I don’t do is copy-paste a ChatGPT output and hit publish. Every article I’ve written carries my voice, my research, my lived experience, and my perspective. If you’ve read my work, you know that.”

That sounds similar to the way I use AI, as feedback, in a conversational way.

But what he doesn’t say is also what Claude didn’t say about the protocol, which is that, critically, Mr. Collins Protocol instructs the writer to set a timer to 20 minutes and speed write all of one’s ideas about a particular subject without correcting typos or any other sort of error. Just write it all down as fast as you can in twenty minutes flat. Then you take that and put it through the AI grinder, skipping the human meditative process because AI can do it faster, which is the basis of the AI “productivity” sales pitch. AI will structure it for you- the goal is to write a post in 45 minutes- that’s productivity, and an AI-assisted writer can do it faster than a writer using ancient, outdated meditative practices.

Not only is AI promoted as faster, but it is also said to produce better results than humans.

You be the judge:

I let Claude analyze what is in Mr. Collins protocol. Claude missed the part about writing all your thoughts down in twenty minutes- that’s called stream of consciousness, but cutting out the meditative process that happens when allowing more than twenty minutes to evolve one’s stream of consciousness on a subject transforms it into an AI writing process. For a human process example, this post was started quite a while ago, shortly after I wrote the post published on February 28, but my instinct was to let it sit for a while.

Little did I know that while it was sitting, Medium would revoke Mr. Collins Partnership’s privileges, which is how one makes money on Medium. Nor did I know that I would click on Mr. Collins protocol and find that the cost had been reduced to zero, which compelled me to purchase it so I could have a deeper insight into what his protocol is about.

Collin’s protocol starts by instructing the human to reduce the length of the meditative process to 20 minutes and let AI handle the most time-consuming part of the writing process, as if to say that having an idea is the writing part, rather than how one expresses that idea, being the writing part. That is the core of Mr. Collin’s defense.

Right now it is 5:09 am. I woke up a while ago, and I was thinking about what I am currently writing. I was thinking about the difference between Claude’s synopsis and my own. I immediately noticed Mr. Collins’ advice about putting oneself on a timer and rushing to write down all one’s thoughts in 20 minutes. Claude didn’t pick up on it, probably because Claude doesn’t have an existence in space-time. Although I picked up on it as soon as I read it, I didn’t process any of the thoughts that I am now writing down. Instead, I woke up early in the morning and found myself processing these thoughts, so much so that I decided to get up and write them down. Now it’s 5:14 AM, and I am going back to sleep.

It’s morning again, and back at it.

I like to take my time, but I am not making money, and my follower growth is slow. The thought of gaining 17900 followers in six months does not thrill me; all I can say is, if it happened, then I would have to deal with it. However, I learn something about SEO from Colin’s protocol, and strangely, I thought I read advice about publishing on Reddit, being that Medium now has “External Traffic” bonus earnings. However, when I carefully re-read the protocol looking for that advice, it wasn’t there- but it’s a good idea, accordingly, one needs to link to the post on Medium to get the bobis.

Collins writes:

Here is the brutal truth: If you copy-paste from ChatGPT, your account is dead. Medium’s fraud detection in 2026 is ruthless. If your article smells like a bot, you are “Shadow banned” — you can publish, but nobody will ever see it.

But here is the other truth: If you don’t use AI, you are too slow. The big earners aren’t writing every word from scratch. They are using AI as a “Cyborg” — part human (soul), part machine (speed).

I am going to give you the exact 9-Phase Workflow I use to produce 5 high-quality articles a week while working a full-time job.

The first paragraph sounds like my relationship with Medium from day one, when I had zero followers. I keep gaining followers, but hardly at the rate of a hundred a day. I don’t know how they find me. Does Medium think I use AI to write? After being here since 2019, I made 15 cents from what I published in February, which is not the recommended rate of at least one story a day. I am doing much better in March. I have already made 24 cents, but I won’t see that for a few years at the rate I am going because Medium instituted a new policy several months ago that it will only issue a payout when the amount earned is $10.00 or more. The last I checked, I am up to $3.40.

I don’t publish on Medium expecting to make an income; it’s more like “Why not?” I make more money on Substack but find more community engagement on Medium. I watch the blog streams on Substack, but it is not usually interactive.

Ah! I see the reason now that I have read the second paragraph, I, being a mere human, am too slow! Use human for soul and machine for speed, he says, but in fact, his instructions say to use both for speed; only 20 minutes are designated for the soul participation, the results of which Collins refers to as the “Vomit Draft”.

By calling the only part of the process involving exclusive human input, the “Vomit Draft”, Collins is acknowledging that it is AI that transforms the part created by a human into something digestible, marketable, and profitable. defeating his own self-defense.

My human soul works differently; it wakes me up in the wee hours of the morning and instructs me to write if I want to get back to sleep, and here I am still writing the same piece at 8:01 PM! Too slow!

I clicked on Colin’s profile and saw that ”Two days ago,” when Medium revoked his Partner Plan, has become “Three days ago,” but his followers remain the same at 17900. It appears that his follower growth is tied to his partner program, even though he explains in his protocol that one doesn’t even need to be a paid Medium subscriber to earn, as was formerly the case. What is the financial source of the payouts other than from the subscribers, since Medium does not sponsor advertisements?

The Collins Protocol is to speed write a stream of consciousness for twenty minutes, take the results or the “vomit draft” and put them into the AI grinder, which will structure and polish much faster than the soul can ever do.

The Collins protocol replaces my slow-moving human process that struggles with crystallizing what I am saying. My human soul has an idea that transforms and unfolds with the unfolding of time. I write, and then I read, and then I write, and then I read, as I am reading, I anticipate the changes to be made, move this thought here, eliminate that thought there, replace one word with another more precise. As I am reading, the words that replace the words written in haste walk the path ahead of me. Moving the paragraphs around is structuring, and replacing words is polishing, and it is all part of the human writing process, which is more than just an idea; it is also craft. I come from a long lineage of handcrafting. The human writing process is parallel to the hand-made crafting process of physical things, but in the non-material world.

My Dad’s handcrafted sugar bowl with his original pink and back glaze from the late forties

Now Medium has taken a stand that is consistent with my view, but as the protocol tells us, this soon-to-be closing subsidy window is such that the Medium algorithm favors writers with zero followers so much so that six months later, Collins has 17300 followers. Could Medium have come up with a target that was not so easy to exploit?

(Google AI( Yes, recent reports indicate that the Medium algorithm (as of 2025–2026) acts as a “subsidy window” for new writers, often providing higher visibility to fresh accounts with zero followers compared to established, inactive ones.

This shift is designed to prioritize high-quality, authentic content over follower count, allowing new voices to gain traction quickly if their stories resonate with readers )

Shane’s sales pitch.

“Right now, Medium is paying an unprecedented premium for human stories. They are desperate to lock in authentic voices before AI agents completely flood the internet. This panic has created a “Subsidy Window” — a temporary algorithmic anomaly where a brand-new account with zero followers can easily out-earn a five-year veteran.” source

**Browse 100+ publications in the Boost Nomination Program**

Collins says he has a full-time job, and I wonder what it is since I have never come across him talking about it. Is it the company he founded in September 2025, coinciding with starting a Medium profile with zero followers? I haven’t read all his articles, but none that I have read talk about his business as I talk about mine. I wonder why? He says to use the word “I” to flag oneself as human. Writing about one’s own experience does that well, but Collins writes from a knowledge perspective about other subjects.

Colins Protocol includes prompts to get AI to write the titles and the subtitles with a proven formula that is very recognizable and redundant everywhere. He tells us that to look like a professional magazine, we need AI-created images and exemplifies that with AI imagery slop.

In his article about Medium revoking his partner program privileges, Collins portrays his real reason for changing platforms as being that he is concerned about his stories being accessible to those who can’t afford the $5 Medium subscription fee, and so after researching alternate platforms for an hour, he came up with X as the best solution because:

X has hundreds of millions of active users. There’s no paywall between my writing and my readers. And with the creator monetization program, writers who build an engaged audience can earn revenue through ads, subscriptions, and tips — without forcing readers to pay before they’ve even read a single word.

Colins misread his readership big time on that one. His fans all tell him they love his stories, but won’t be following him to X.

Collins then continues to explain why he feels that being flagged for using AI to generate his stories is unjustified:

Yes, I use AI in my workflow. I’ve never hidden that. I use it the same way a photographer uses Lightroom or an architect uses CAD — as a tool that enhances my process, not one that replaces it.

Every argument in my articles is mine. Every analogy comes from my own experience. Every controversial take reflects my genuine thinking. AI helps me get from draft to polish faster, but it doesn’t think for me.

Having an idea in one’s mind is not the equivalent of being a writer. To be a writer, one has to engage in the process of writing, which includes “structuring” and “polishing” those ideas into a communicable form.

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It is now 11:57 am as I hit publish