Latest / HumanPrint: How to Use AI Without Losing Yourself / What Convenience Is Costing You

Transcript

What Convenience Is Costing You · HumanPrint: How to Use AI Without Losing Yourself

• 0:00
  Foreign.
• 0:05
  Welcome to Human Print. I am Christine Whitmarsh, and if
• 0:09
  you are open to collaborating with AI but you're not interested in disappearing
• 0:13
  into AI, you're in the right place. Each week,
• 0:17
  we will look at one place where your authentic human signal is at risk for
• 0:20
  drift and one way to shore it up.
• 0:23
  Oh, and Human Print is brought to you by Abby AI Brand
• 0:28
  bank intelligence that helps authors, thought leaders, and enterprise
• 0:32
  teams train AI on their voice and point of view so
• 0:36
  written content stays unmistakably human, consistent and on brand.
• 0:41
  Learn more@abbey.ink a b b
• 0:46
  I.ink like you write with. Let's begin.
• 0:52
  Hi, everyone. Welcome back to Human Print.
• 0:56
  And all right, so far in episode one, we talked about drift in writing,
• 1:00
  how AI can pull your writing away from your voice without you even noticing
• 1:04
  sometimes. And then in episode two, we talked about the difference between a
• 1:08
  strong voice and a polished one. And why polish alone doesn't mean what it used
• 1:12
  to mean, that there was a writer behind the whole thing. Today, let's move past
• 1:16
  that debate about whether to use AI at all. I think that ship has
• 1:20
  sailed for most people, including me. And let's ask a new question, a better question
• 1:24
  question. What should stay in your hands as a
• 1:27
  human on purpose? So here's the pattern I'm seeing. I.
• 1:31
  I work with people who care about their ideas and how those ideas
• 1:35
  land, like authors as a book coach and a ghostwriter. And over the past year
• 1:39
  or so, you know, I started to notice something. The people I talk to,
• 1:42
  they're not struggling with whether or not to use AI. They're struggling with the fact
• 1:46
  that they started using it for support. And then bit by
• 1:50
  bit, day by day, task by task, output by output,
• 1:53
  it started to become something else for them. At some point, the tool
• 1:57
  that was just once organizing their notes, it started determining their point of view.
• 2:01
  The machine that was cleaning up their drafts was suddenly tasked with guessing about
• 2:05
  the ideas and curiosities and questions that were floating around in their
• 2:10
  human operator's head. And most people didn't notice when that shift happened.
• 2:15
  So the real issue here is governance. Use of AI is not the issue.
• 2:19
  Governance is who's driving, whose judgment is shaping the
• 2:22
  work, whose meaning is getting made. A tool can support your
• 2:27
  process without taking over your role in it. And that boundary is
• 2:31
  a thing, because drift typically shows up through a series of small,
• 2:34
  seemingly reasonable handoffs. At first, maybe you
• 2:37
  want help organizing your notes. That's cool. All right. Later, you want the angle chosen
• 2:41
  for you. Now, next, you're asking the tool to tell you what's most important to
• 2:45
  you. By then, the machine is no longer just helping you clarify your thinking.
• 2:49
  Now it is moved into part of the process, the part where you're as a
• 2:53
  human being supposed to wrestle and decide and make meaning. That's the uncomfortable
• 2:57
  friction part of writing. Another big theme on the show, the friction of writing.
• 3:00
  And it's a bigger handoff than it looks. Now. My personal red
• 3:05
  line, my land, my line in the sand. That's my core message.
• 3:09
  That's the central argument of anything that I'm writing. Again, a social media post to
• 3:12
  email, an article. You know, AI can help me untangle my many,
• 3:16
  many, many meandering trains of thoughts,
• 3:19
  like a tangled up ball of yarn. And it can help me, you know,
• 3:22
  figure out what I, you know, how I want to sort out my thinking.
• 3:25
  But it's still my thinking. And it's, it's always an extensive two way conversation,
• 3:29
  one in which I assure you, I am always in the driver's seat, which means
• 3:33
  the argument itself, the main ideas, they still come from my brain. If I
• 3:37
  let a tool decide what I'm actually saying or thinking, then I'm not authoring anymore.
• 3:41
  I'm approving somebody else's copy. One thing I want to push back on is the
• 3:45
  idea that your normal human slow process is a problem to be solved.
• 3:49
  Slowness is not some problem to be solved. Slow is sometimes
• 3:53
  awesome, especially in creativity. So some slower processes aren't failures,
• 3:57
  they are the system hesitation that can carry wisdom.
• 4:01
  Wrestling produces better questions. Sitting with uncertainty,
• 4:04
  or in my case, freestyle scribbling in a five subject notebook that might be exactly
• 4:08
  where you figure out what you think. Skip that often enough. And with AI,
• 4:12
  you can still end up with output. But output and authorship are
• 4:16
  two different things. Let me say that again. Output and authorship
• 4:20
  are two different things. And so at that point,
• 4:23
  who's responsible for the input? Who fed the machine the ideas that
• 4:27
  created the output? Assistance can sharpen your process, but outsourcing
• 4:32
  eliminates it. So here's where the line gets specific and I
• 4:36
  want to make this concrete because in real life that line gets blurry super fast,
• 4:40
  especially when you're busy. And the tool just makes things so easy. And it sounds
• 4:43
  convincing. We know these things, right? These, these LLMs, these, these bots, they sound
• 4:47
  so convincing, where it's like, no, this is great what I've done for you.
• 4:50
  You don't have to worry about it at all. But it's a machine, not an
• 4:53
  author. AI is genuinely helpful when you use it to organize
• 4:57
  a messy pile of notes. You can summarize transcripts so you can review them faster.
• 5:00
  Uncover patterns. Like a microwave, right? For cooking. Uncover patterns across
• 5:05
  material based on ideas that you originated.
• 5:08
  Maybe generate possible headlines. But then you have to pick the headline.
• 5:11
  Don't let the thing do it for you. Stress test your thinking by offering
• 5:15
  counterarguments, challenging you. That's support. The trouble starts
• 5:19
  when the tool starts deciding your core message, before you've figured out what it
• 5:23
  is yourself. When it starts choosing the emotional frame. Before you
• 5:27
  know how you feel about a subject. When the AI tells you what
• 5:31
  your audience cares about based on generic averages. When it resolves ambiguity
• 5:35
  before you've had any time to sit with it. There's that friction again. Thinking,
• 5:38
  thinking, friction. So here's the million dollar question.
• 5:42
  What are you handing off because it's genuinely useful?
• 5:45
  And what are you handing off because you're tired, rushed, or disconnected
• 5:50
  from your own thinking? Because you didn't allow yourself the time to sit in that
• 5:53
  friction? Sit in that discomfort. It doesn't have to be a notebook, that's totally my
• 5:56
  bias. But just maybe take a walk with it. Really sit and figure out
• 6:00
  what you think about a subject as a human being and just the emotions
• 6:04
  all around that. So what are you handing off? Because you want to avoid that?
• 6:08
  Because maybe you know what? Maybe it's hard. Some handoffs are practical,
• 6:12
  others are emotional. For others, self trust is the issue.
• 6:15
  Sometimes the real world is that making the call would force you to get clear
• 6:19
  on what you actually value. Maybe we don't know that yet. It's sometimes
• 6:23
  easier to let the tool decide so the stakes stay low.
• 6:27
  And I say this with compassion because I've felt the poll myself.
• 6:31
  But when the underlying problem is disconnection from your own thinking,
• 6:34
  more outsourcing isn't going to fix that. It isn't going to fix that
• 6:38
  discomfort. What helps is slowing down long enough to
• 6:42
  reconnect with the part of you that should still be driving. I know that's super
• 6:46
  annoying advice, but it's also accurate. Trust your friendly book writing coach.
• 6:50
  So here's this week's homework. Or try this and see if it works for you.
• 6:54
  Thank you. Define one human judgment. Red line.
• 6:58
  Draw your line in the sand. Choose one part of your process that AI
• 7:02
  is not allowed to decide for you. AI is not allowed into
• 7:06
  this part of your process. The thinking or the development, the writing, the editing.
• 7:09
  It could be multiple parts. The part where it's like, nope, nope, this is all
• 7:12
  me. The tool is not allowed in. And be very specific.
• 7:16
  Again, mine is my central argument, the core claim of a piece. Yours might
• 7:20
  be different. Maybe it's the emotional truth of something that you're writing. Maybe it's the
• 7:23
  strategic call about which direction to take your business. Or maybe
• 7:27
  it's like, which evidence matters most in some research you're doing. Just could be
• 7:32
  a million things. Write down three things that AI can help you
• 7:36
  do. Then write down the one thing it's not allowed to decide.
• 7:39
  So three things that it's allowed
• 7:43
  to help you with, and one thing that is absolutely not allowed to help
• 7:47
  you with. So it's like three supports. One boundary. Protect the place
• 7:51
  where you're most likely to drift when you're tired or under pressure or tempted to
• 7:55
  let the convenience make the call. Hold the line.
• 7:58
  And that is it for today's episode of Human Print.
• 8:02
  I hope you're finding some value here. And until next time, use the
• 8:06
  tool. Use the AI if it helps, just don't hand it the pen.
• 8:18
  And that's it for this episode of Human Print. If you want
• 8:22
  a practical framework for protecting your voice amid the AI noise,
• 8:25
  please follow the show. And before you go, take a minute and ask yourself,
• 8:29
  as the AI noise grows louder and louder, which areas of
• 8:34
  yourself do you need to protect the most? I'll see you next time.