Latest / HumanPrint: How to Use AI Without Losing Yourself / How to Hear Yourself Again

Transcript

How to Hear Yourself Again · HumanPrint: How to Use AI Without Losing Yourself

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  Foreign.
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  Welcome to Human Print. I am Christine Whitmarsh, and if you are
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  open to collaborating with AI but you're not interested in disappearing
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  into AI, you're in the right place. Each week we will
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  look at one place where your authentic human signal is at risk for drift and
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  one way to shore it up. Oh, and Human Print
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  is brought to you by Abby AI Brand bank intelligence
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  that helps authors, thought leaders, and enterprise teams
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  train AI on their voice and point of view so
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  written content stays unmistakably human, consistent and on brand.
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  Learn more at abbey.incabbi.ink
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  like you write with. Let's begin.
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  Hi, everybody, and welcome back to human print.
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  In 2016, Bob Dylan won the Nobel Prize in literature
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  for creating, according to the Nobel committee, and I quote,
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  new poetic expressions within the great American song
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  tradition. Sweet, right? The part I'm interested in focusing on today
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  is people know when they're hearing Bob Dylan lyrics, like whether
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  you love his voice, hate it, respect it, argue with it, imitate it badly
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  during karaoke, you know it's him, right? So here's a real problem
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  with finding your voice. With AI, A lot of the conversation around
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  writing voice is stuck on this idea of finding your voice. Like your voice is
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  like MIA somewhere, you know, a photo of your missing voice on a milk carton.
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  Tell me that's not an 80s reference. But for a lot of
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  people, especially people who have spent years writing carefully,
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  professionally, and whatever tone and style they thought was correct, the issue is more
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  basic than that. They've never really developed the habit of hearing themselves
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  in the first place. So, like, you write something rough,
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  maybe it's a paragraph, an email, the beginning of an article, a personal story you've
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  been kind of picking away at and circling for years. And then you hand it
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  to AI and you ask for help, right? When I say AI, I'm talking about
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  like the LLMs, the chatbots. And the AI version comes
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  back and it's smoother and, excuse me, cleaner sentences, more organized.
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  The grammar is fine. Maybe it even sounds more professional on the surface.
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  And for a second you're like, all right, great, that's better. But when you read
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  it the second time, it's more, eh, I don't know. You don't feel
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  that little internal recognition of, yes, that's what I meant. That is super cool that
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  I wrote that. You're not connected to it. You don't hate it. It just doesn't
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  create a spark, that non reaction to the thing that you handed
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  to AI without any real supervision or Active collaboration.
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  That's data. So last episode,
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  we talked about the urge to fix the weird parts of your writing. You know,
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  Emily Dickinson. And the problem of rigid editors, whether human or
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  AI, trying to edit the very thing that gives writing its human signal.
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  The point was about protecting the meaning that you bring to the table
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  when writing. So for today's episode, we're talking about the ability
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  to hear your own voice before you hand it over to be revised,
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  cleaned up, or quote, unquote, improved. This weird assumption
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  that generative AI knows your writing voice better than you do.
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  Pretty fluent. Grammatically perfect sentences aren't necessarily an improvement
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  over you. So your writing voice, and I think people sometimes
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  overcomplicate this. It doesn't come from correct sentences. It comes
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  from the stories you choose to tell, the beliefs you're willing to put on
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  the page, the ideas you're obsessed with, the things you notice
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  that someone else might walk right past, and the phrases that
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  are a direct result of your actual human lived experiences.
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  That's your writing voice. And that's why hearing yourself has to become a
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  habit, like a writing practice, but specifically for tuning into your own frequency
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  before you let outside things mess with the signal.
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  Now, I've seen this over and over with my memoir. Authors, as a book coach,
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  they think their biggest problem is writing ability. They worry that their sentences,
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  that their writing is just not good enough, or that their stories are too personal
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  or messy, or that they don't know how to sound like an author, whatever that
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  means. There it is. You know, sound like an author, the damage that
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  that phrase has caused. Because the second that people try to sound like
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  an author, they tend to stop sounding like themselves.
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  They start describing their story instead of telling it.
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  They summarize the emotional parts because the actual emotional parts
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  feel maybe too raw or too specific or too much like a confession.
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  They make the lesson too neat or generic. They write
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  the version that they think is serious book. Like serious books are supposed to have
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  writing like this. But somewhere in that process, they themselves
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  as a human being, they disappear from the page. So a lot of my
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  work as a book coach is coaxing people back to their actual story, their ideas,
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  their natural writing style. And by that I mean write your story. Write what
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  happened. Write what you believed then and what you believe now.
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  Write the thing you keep skipping because it feels too direct or too personal
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  or too much like something you'd actually say if you
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  were worried about. About what people think. That's where your voice
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  is hiding. When a memoir client finally stops trying to sound
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  Impressive. And writes the actual sentences, the ones with the real memories,
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  the real regret, the real humor, the real, oh, my God, I can't believe I'm
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  putting this on paper, but it's actually what happened. Well, that's when
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  we can finally get to work. We can shape that, you know, coach and client.
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  We can revise that. We can, you know, work on that, but you have to
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  have it first. And some people might hear this and think,
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  okay, but what if I don't know what I actually mean? And my answer
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  to that is, great. That's literally part of writing. A lot of people
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  want voice to arrive before the writing starts. Like it's some kind of prerequisite or
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  something you need to have figured out before you're allowed to start writing. You have
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  to, like, know all the answers. That's not what writing is. In my experience,
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  all that develops through the writing. You find out what you think by making
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  yourself put words around it, and then you revise those words until they get clearer
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  without becoming any less yours. And this is where AI
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  can either help or get in the way, depending on when you invite it in
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  and what job or jobs you give it. If you ask AI
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  to draft the whole thing before you've done any real thinking, well, sure, it'll give
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  you something pretty. It has language and patterns and sentences and grammar and.
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  But it has the same shape of any paragraph you'll see that has been
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  kicked out by AI. But if you haven't given it your stories, your beliefs,
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  your point of view, your weird little preferences,
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  your please do not say it that way instincts. I mean,
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  what exactly is it preserving? What is it protecting if you haven't told it?
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  What matters to you. And those of you who maybe caught my
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  first podcast years ago, it's called you'd Daily Writing Habit. It's still available on YouTube,
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  by the way. You guys know I spent a lot of time over there talking
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  about practice, you know, about setting that regular writing habit, sitting down
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  and writing regularly and building the muscle, and not waiting until you felt perfectly
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  inspired or qualified or emotionally ready or whatever other
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  excuse felt reasonable that day, given how your life kept getting in the way.
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  And, oh, yeah, by the way, life will always get in the way.
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  That's what makes habits hard, but worth it. You can't wait for
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  life to not get in the way. Human print. This podcast now is picking
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  up that same thread, but just, you know, a slightly different landscape.
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  Back then, the question was, how do I build a writing practice when life
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  is so busy? I mean, I'M scared to death to do it. The idea of
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  writing a book is literally overwhelming. How in the heck do I do this?
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  But now, with AI in the room, there's new questions, like how
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  do I build a writing practice that keeps me from becoming less recognizable
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  to myself? Same thread, just different source
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  of friction. So let's return to Bob Dylan for a second. His voice
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  didn't become significant because it satisfied everyone's idea of pretty.
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  His voice was distinct enough to be recognized and argued with
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  and remembered and carried throughout decades of work. A smoother
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  singer could sing a Dylan song and make it prettier. Someone could tidy
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  up the lyrics, remove the weird phrasing, you know, the awesomeness, make the whole thing
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  easier to digest, and call it improved. Right, but improved according to
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  what or to whom? That's the question I want you
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  all to be asking yourselves. Because polish has to serve the
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  person and the purpose. And if the polish is replacing the person,
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  well, Houston, we have a problem. So here's what I
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  want you to do this week. Here's your homework. Before you ask AI
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  to draft or revise something that matters to you, and I mean something where your
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  voice and your thinking actually needs to show up, record yourself
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  talking through the idea for three minutes. Just three minutes. You're not performing.
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  You're not trying to be brilliant. You're not making a podcast. You're just talking through
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  the idea the way you'd explain it to one person sitting across from you who
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  actually wants to understand what you mean and why it's important to
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  you. What you mean and why it's important to you. That's what you should
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  focus on. Then use that transcript as your starting point. Read it.
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  Look for the places where you sound most like yourself. Like, where does the energy
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  change? Where do you get more specific? Where do you say something plainly that maybe
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  would have ended up overworked if you just handed it to AI right from
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  that material. That's your first draft. And after that, if you want to bring in
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  AI, bring it with the instructions to protect what it already heard, tell it what
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  to keep, what not to change, where are your voices? And yeah,
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  this is slower than just asking AI to write the whole thing.
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  You know, at first it is anyway. But so is learning to write a book
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  instead of talking about writing a book. So is building a daily
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  writing habit instead of waiting for that mythical perfect morning when your schedule and mood
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  and confidence and caffeine levels all kind of align at
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  the same time. Good luck with that. We already know how that goes the shortcut
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  can become the long way around if it keeps you from developing the skill you
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  actually need. Especially as AI weaves itself into our lives more
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  and more and more, this is the time. This is the ideal time to
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  find your unique writing signal. Develop it, lean into it, make it
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  your home base. Can you recognize yourself on the page?
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  If not, don't panic. But don't outsource the question either.
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  Talk it through right from there, then revise.
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  All right, that's it for today's episode of Human
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  Print. I hope you're enjoying the show. Thanks for tuning in. Until next time,
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  use the tool if it helps, just don't hand it
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  the pen.
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  And that's it for this episode of Human Print. If you want
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  a practical framework for protecting your voice amid the AI noise,
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  please follow the show. And before you go, take a minute and ask yourself,
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  as the AI noise grows louder and louder, which areas
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  of yourself do you need to protect the most? I'll see you
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  next time.