Latest / HumanPrint: How to Use AI Without Losing Yourself / The Pretty Sentences Are Lying to You

Transcript

The Pretty Sentences Are Lying to 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 we will look
• 0:17
  at one place where your authentic human signal is at risk for drift
• 0:20
  and one way to shore it up. Oh, and Human
• 0:25
  Print is brought to you by Abby AI Brand bank intelligence
• 0:29
  that helps authors, thought leaders and enterprise teams
• 0:32
  train AI on their voice and point of view so
• 0:36
  written content stays unmistakably human, consistent and on
• 0:40
  brand. Learn more at abby.ink a b
• 0:45
  b I.ink like you write with.
• 0:48
  Let's begin.
• 0:53
  Hi everyone and welcome back to Human Print Episode two.
• 0:57
  So last episode, my first we talked about drift.
• 1:01
  We talked about how genai can pull your writing away from
• 1:04
  your own voice so gradually you don't even notice until over time
• 1:08
  you realize that something feels off. You're no longer you today.
• 1:13
  Let's go one level deeper. Because drift doesn't just happen randomly.
• 1:17
  There's no writing drift, Powerball. It happens when you confuse two
• 1:21
  things that look similar but do very different jobs. A unique
• 1:24
  human voice versus a polished one. For years,
• 1:28
  polish was synonymous with effort. When something sounded like really smooth
• 1:32
  and good and coherent and well put together, most of us, especially those of us
• 1:35
  who write for a living, we assumed that a person had worked really hard to
• 1:39
  create that result. There had been some wrestling in the background. Personally, when I struggle
• 1:43
  with writing, as experienced writers all do, I personally
• 1:47
  tend to start sweating and I feel like I want to crawl out of my
• 1:49
  skin. There's my breakthrough friction. Visual for you. So yeah,
• 1:53
  good writing takes judgment, editing and work. It takes actual time figuring out
• 1:57
  what you meant and how you wanted to say it. Hence all the sweating.
• 2:01
  But now polish is easy to get. You can get there fast
• 2:06
  and with very little friction. You can get something that sounds organized and competent
• 2:10
  without spending all afternoon fighting with a paragraph that just doesn't want to cooperate
• 2:14
  and be put in its into its place. Which means polish no longer proves what
• 2:18
  it used to prove. A paragraph can sound finished and still be generic.
• 2:23
  It can sound smart and still be interchangeable with a sea of other paragraphs
• 2:27
  just like it. So if polish isn't the signal
• 2:31
  for writing effort anymore, what is? It has been said
• 2:35
  that writing is thinking. A strong voice carries a mind inside it.
• 2:39
  You can hear choices being made. Taste, rhythm, emphasis, a point of view.
• 2:42
  You can hear an actual person deciding what they think about just
• 2:47
  through their words. And that decision making process, it's messy again. It involves
• 2:51
  friction. It involves saying, no, that's not what I mean. That's not how I sound.
• 2:55
  And trying again and again and again until the sentence sounds like
• 2:58
  you said it, not like anyone could have said it. Now, if you caught last
• 3:02
  week's Human Print episode, you remember I said some of the things that make your
• 3:06
  work yours, that stuff lives in the friction. This is where the idea
• 3:10
  gets specific. The friction is where your voice gets
• 3:13
  forged. Skip the friction and you risk losing what makes you
• 3:18
  you. So here's what ghostwriting taught
• 3:21
  me about this. One thing I've noticed while writing the book version of this podcast,
• 3:25
  and this has been humbling, is how easy it is to smoot the sentence
• 3:29
  past the point where it still has a pulse. Especially it still has a pulse.
• 3:33
  That is me. I catch myself doing it. And that's again, after 20 plus
• 3:37
  years of ghostwriting. My instinct is actually to go in the other direction. As a
• 3:40
  ghostwriter, my job is to find the version of a sentence that sounds most like
• 3:44
  the human being saying it. Like my clients, right? Not the prettiest version or
• 3:49
  the one that, you know, just sounds like the most professional, but the one that
• 3:52
  sounds most like them. That's like the entire gig.
• 3:56
  That's what all those years and all those hundreds of thousands of words taught me.
• 3:59
  The best writing sounds like a person.
• 4:02
  But it took a long time to learn that. I think most writers go through
• 4:05
  this phase, I definitely did, where you think, like, good writing means fancy writing.
• 4:09
  You're trying to be all fancy. You reach for the more elegant word, the longer
• 4:12
  sentence, the construction. That sounds like something you think one of the literary greats
• 4:17
  might have written. That's basically the reality of learning how to write. Going from trying
• 4:21
  to be fancy and showing off all the writing things to know, you know,
• 4:25
  trying to be real, be a real person, that's becoming a
• 4:29
  writer. The problem is AI, our little AI
• 4:33
  buddies, they're stuck in the phase where it's trying to be fancy
• 4:37
  and show off literally everything it knows about the craft of writing in every single
• 4:41
  output. Have you noticed that you like the output? It's just like, okay, I understand,
• 4:44
  you know, all the grammar things. You don't have to put them in every single
• 4:49
  output. So that's the AI slop, or AI speak.
• 4:52
  Everybody calls it something different. It's picking what it thinks are the right words.
• 4:56
  Because remember, it doesn't actually know you from a hole in the
• 5:00
  wall, no matter how convinced you are otherwise. The AI, this is basically
• 5:04
  more of a statistical supercomputer I just read this book called Atomic AI
• 5:08
  and that's what the author calls it, and I thought that was pretty accurate.
• 5:11
  It's kind of guessing. It doesn't actually know your writing voice. So that's
• 5:15
  where AI is stuck right now. It writes like a writer who hasn't found their
• 5:19
  voice yet. It writes like someone who reads a lot but hasn't lived enough
• 5:23
  for the reading to become their own. The grammar's clean, the structure's solid, and it
• 5:28
  reads like good writing in the most generic, textbook sense, but there's no specific
• 5:32
  human inside of it. There's no accumulated experience shaping
• 5:36
  the word choices. There's no moment where someone decided, no, this is what I mean,
• 5:40
  not that. And they chose the less pretty version because it was more them.
• 5:44
  Every writer goes through that phase. It's part of learning AI
• 5:47
  It's. It's a machine. It can't grow out of it because it has no lived
• 5:51
  experience shaping its choices. Experienced writers,
• 5:55
  they know that the fancy sentence isn't the goal. The real sentence is the
• 5:59
  one that comes from your actual point of view, your. Your actual experience of the
• 6:02
  subject, not from a pattern of how people generally talk about it.
• 6:06
  So here's what this looks like in practice. Say you're writing
• 6:10
  about why clients freeze up during the revision stage of their book.
• 6:13
  An AI or an inexperienced writer might say something like,
• 6:18
  many authors struggle to articulate what isn't working during the revision
• 6:23
  process. I don't know if they'd use that voice, but you know what I mean.
• 6:26
  So it's fine. It's grammatical, but it doesn't really communicate anything.
• 6:29
  Now, an experienced writer who's actually been in this room might say,
• 6:33
  most people would rather hand back a manuscript they don't fully love than admit they
• 6:38
  don't know what's bothering them about it. Say, see? Same topic. But the second version
• 6:41
  has a point of view. It has emotion, it has lived experience. It has kind
• 6:45
  of nerve. It has a nervous system. It comes from watching that
• 6:48
  exact thing happen, not from a language pattern about what
• 6:53
  revision technically might involve as an author. It's not a language
• 6:56
  pattern. It's a lived experience. So know your voice before you hand over your
• 7:01
  draft. And I want to be clear. This is not an AI bashing podcast.
• 7:05
  I mean, like, not even in the same galaxy, especially,
• 7:08
  you know, those binary points of view of either being totally
• 7:11
  pro or totally anti AI that. That's not me. I'm much more about, like,
• 7:15
  the middle ground. I think there's such better discoveries to be found in the
• 7:19
  middle Ground than in the black and white thinking. I mean, I use AI.
• 7:23
  I built a voice intelligence system around it. I think there are smart ways to
• 7:26
  bring it into your writing process as long as you don't lose yourself. So if
• 7:30
  you're going to use it, you need to know what your voice sounds like before
• 7:33
  you start using it, before you hand your draft over.
• 7:37
  Because AI can't tell which bit of roughness in your writing had a purpose,
• 7:41
  like which parts of the weird stuff that you did on purpose. It doesn't know
• 7:44
  which phrase carries your actual cadence or which sentence sounds
• 7:48
  most like you. It knows language. It knows a grammar book. And language
• 7:52
  without a specific point of view is nothing more than grammatical filler.
• 7:56
  The difference between strong writing and polished writing has nothing to do
• 8:00
  with skill level. Plenty of skilled writers produce polished,
• 8:03
  lifeless, emotionless whatever work.
• 8:06
  The difference is whether there's a real human point of view running through
• 8:10
  it, one that somebody chose to keep intentionally, even when
• 8:14
  the prettier version was right there for the taking. I mean, it's so tempting,
• 8:18
  right? So here we go. We have homework. Here's our weekly homework.
• 8:22
  If any of my book coaching clients are listening, I can hear you laughing.
• 8:24
  You guys know I'm all about the assigning of homework. So if
• 8:29
  that word triggers you, the word homework, think of it as try this thing and
• 8:32
  see if it works. How about that? So try this.
• 8:36
  Look at something you've written recently and find a sentence that sounds super impressive
• 8:40
  and fancy, but it doesn't actually communicate anything. Certainly not a
• 8:43
  lived experience. You'll know it when you see it. It reads really well. And if
• 8:47
  you took it out, the paragraph wouldn't lose a single thing that matters. That's a
• 8:50
  huge thing right there that I talk about with my book coaching clients when they're
• 8:53
  trying to figure out, should I cut this line or this paragraph or this page
• 8:56
  or whatever it's like. Is it advancing the story if it's fiction, or is it
• 9:00
  giving you new information if it's nonfiction? Or is this just kind of like
• 9:03
  repeating and rambling about stuff that you've already said? That's how
• 9:08
  you can tell what to cut. So that's what you're looking for.
• 9:11
  So we're looking for a sentence that does it. So the sentence is there because
• 9:15
  it made you feel like a writer because it's fancy, not because it delivered
• 9:18
  anything fresh or useful to your reader. You know what?
• 9:22
  Cut it. Cut, cut, cut. Write the real messy sentence or the paragraph
• 9:26
  you're avoiding by shoving in the pretty sounding one Write the one that feels a
• 9:30
  little too direct or specific or weird. Just find your real voice and replace
• 9:34
  the fancy, clean sentence with that. And here's a quick way to test
• 9:38
  it. Love doing this with my clients. Read your paragraph out loud.
• 9:42
  Words are totally different when they're out loud, trust me, than when you read them
• 9:45
  in your head and you hear what you think it says. So read it out
• 9:49
  loud. Listen for the spots where you sound like yourself. And then listen for the
• 9:52
  spots where you kind of drift away and start sou like a textbook. Revise from
• 9:57
  the spot where your true voice suddenly disappears.
• 10:00
  And one more thing. Editing for clarity and editing
• 10:05
  for approval or speed, those are two different things. Most people are doing
• 10:08
  the second one. They're editing for speed without realizing it. But clarity
• 10:12
  makes the writing better. Approval makes it safer. And safer is not the same as
• 10:16
  better. So this week, find the comfortable, clinically clean
• 10:21
  sentence. Replace it with the one that's more you. Even if it's a little weird.
• 10:24
  Especially if it's a little weird. And what happens?
• 10:28
  There's your homework. And that's it for today's this week, I should say
• 10:32
  this week's Human Print. Until next time, remember,
• 10:35
  use the tool. If it helps, just don't hand it the pen.
• 10:46
  And that's it for this episode of Human Print. If you want
• 10:50
  a practical framework for protecting your voice amid the AI noise,
• 10:54
  please follow the show. And before you go, take a minute and ask yourself,
• 10:58
  as the AI noise grows louder and louder, which areas of
• 11:02
  yourself do you need to protect the most? I'll see you next time.