Latest / HumanPrint: How to Use AI Without Losing Yourself / The Urge to Fix the Weird Parts

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The Urge to Fix the Weird Parts · 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,
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  and if you are open to collaborating with AI but you're not interested
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  in disappearing into AI you're in the right place.
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  Each week, we will look at one place where your authentic human signal is
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  at risk for drift and one way to shore it up.
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  Oh, and Human Print is brought to you by Abby AI
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  Brand bank intelligence that helps authors, thought leaders,
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  and enterprise teams train AI on their voice and point
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  of view so written content stays unmistakably human,
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  consistent and on brand. Learn more at
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  abby.ink a b b
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  I.ink like you write with. Let's begin.
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  Hi, everybody, and welcome back to Human Print. Today,
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  let's talk about that urge we all have to fix the weird,
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  unpolished parts of our writing. You know, AI might be the newest reason
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  for this urge. So you might recall how I recently characterized
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  AI as that writer who learns all the writing things yesterday and
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  is eager to show them all off today. It wants to show us that it
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  knows every single thing that's existed in the history of
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  writing all in one day, all in one output. So. So, as a result,
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  AI Seems to have adopted this role as the most rigid,
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  literal editor in the world. It's determined to stamp out our
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  unique writing messiness every time we color outside the literary lines. I mean,
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  how dare we write? AI Might be the newest, strictest literal editor,
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  but this idea is not new. For instance,
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  Emily Dickinson dealt with a similar situation with her editor,
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  a guy named Thomas Wentworth Higginson, who was intent on fixing
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  all the weird parts of her writing. In a letter to Higginson, Dickinson wrote,
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  while my thought is undressed, I can make the distinction,
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  but when I put them in the gown, they look alike and
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  numb. Her editor altered things like her unique punctuation
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  and rhythm to make her poems more proper. Now AI Is playing this
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  role of Thomas Wentworth Higginson. I just like saying that we
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  post our random, disconnected and messy thoughts, asking AI to
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  make sense of our ramblings. And if we haven't trained it, if we haven't trained
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  our chatbot, like when you're using, you know, the generic public kind of out of
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  the box LLMs like Chatgpt and Gemini
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  and Claude. If you haven't really done any training without carefully kind
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  of iterating, you know, on your. On your voice, what happens
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  is that AI polishes away all your unique writing edges and produces
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  a perfectly polished paragraph. A textbook piece of grammatical
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  beauty, but something that really, anyone could have written it,
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  didn't write it for you. Not unless you're using a custom trained AI like the
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  ones we create at my company wrote it for, you know, anyone that needs the
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  writing. So yes, AI can make language smoother, but some of
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  your real voice lives in the roughness, the tension between what your soul
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  wants to say and how to say it. It's the part that you think is
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  unfinished, incomplete, or too personal to share with the world. Now these
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  are the parts I've spent years convincing my book coaching clients to keep their authentic
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  voices without trying to sound perfect. Quote unquote,
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  generic AI output is what my memoir clients in particular thought
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  was good book writing before they began working with me.
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  So here's what I learned. The sentence that sounds better can be
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  the wrong sentence if it no longer sounds like the person who wrote it.
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  Let me say that again. The sentence that sounds better
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  can be the wrong sentence if it no longer sounds
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  like the person who wrote it. I have persuaded countless coaching clients to
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  stop circling around their most vulnerable and potentially most valuable stories,
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  messages and ideas because they're just afraid of revealing the
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  deep, messy stuff, the very thing that can have the greatest impact
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  on others. Now, I had to take my own advice if
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  I was going to walk. The walk that I'd been preaching to clients for years
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  when I started writing my own memoir years ago is called the Power of the
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  Curve. The real test hit me when I brushed up against those. Oh. Oh my
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  God, what was I thinking? Life moments and stories, we all have them.
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  Sure, some could be cut in the name of narrative integrity. You know, the stories
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  that didn't really contribute meaningfully to the book's message of finding strength in life's
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  surprises, or in curves in my case. But the ones that did contribute
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  and still made my heart pound a little at the thought of sharing them with
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  the world. Now that's where I had to remind myself to walk the walk.
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  That my mess could be a reader's miracle. So I sucked it
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  up and I shared the messy, vulnerable stuff. And sure enough, when the book was
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  published, my stories resonated and they actually helped people. And they're still helping
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  people. Oh my gosh, six years later. And by sharing my unpolished
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  life edges in my memoir, I realized something. The reason real human
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  writing is messy is because human life is is messy.
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  From facing life changing surgery and having a full length titanium
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  rod kind of like fastened to my spine like you look at the X ray
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  and it looks like giant twist ties to me, like with the trash bags,
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  to turning myself into an acrobat in my mid-40s mainly to
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  commit to exercise as a form of chronic pain management, to pursuing
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  acting and writing in Hollywood, confronting a shocking personal tragedy. You know,
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  life is messy as human beings. If you think about it. We don't really have
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  to be told to write messy or be vulnerable or authentic or any of those
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  other kind of assorted guru slogans we hear about being vulnerable and authentic.
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  Our lives are literally pre written in a way that is the exact
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  opposite of pretty and easy to digest and polished.
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  Do you see now why the unedited outputs of these generic,
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  untrained, out of the box LLMs don't automatically sound like us?
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  They sound like generic grammar book polished versions of us,
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  completely disconnected from the reality of the lives that have formed
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  us and created our unique writing voices. Generative AI
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  might have the baseline grammar and writing skills, but it misses the
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  human messiness. And that's the part of you that lives in the friction,
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  the space between generic AI outputs and the unique
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  human experiences and point of view that come through your writing. If you're a human
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  being with life stories, hey, guess what? You have a writing voice. But if you
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  completely delegate your writing to AI without running interference, you,
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  you know, like Emily Dickinson's editor, you risk never getting to know
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  it. Actually, that wasn't a great example editor. We don't want that kind of interference.
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  You know what I'm saying? Hidden in that friction are little almost imperceptible
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  decisions like the ones that shape our lives from moment to moment.
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  You know, little micro decisions that guide the conversations you have with the chatbot
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  as you shape a piece of your writing all the way through the back
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  and forth led by you of writing and then editing.
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  Do you see now what you're missing by just giving your chatbot a simple
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  underdeveloped writing prompt and then just kind of hoping for the best.
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  You need to have that conversation with it and polish it and really understand your
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  writing voice. Or else it's just going to be a very generic output that anybody
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  could have. So here's your homework. Here's what I want you
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  to do this week. Write something messy. And you so
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  lived messy life. You on purpose. The kind of messy that's personal,
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  like it makes you nervous, you know, like heart pounding, like my memoir stories.
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  Have the courage to ask AI to polish it, but not to
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  make it into something that's not. You share it with the world or one
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  person. Just see how it feels to share something messy, but that's you keep
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  doing it and you'll discover and map and develop your own unique writing voice.
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  So, back to Emily Dickinson for a moment. Let me leave you with three questions
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  inspired by Ms. Dickinson pushing back on her editor over a hundred years ago.
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  What would an AI or any rigid editor reject
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  about your natural writing voice? So what would Emily Dickinson's editor
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  automatically reject and say, oh, that's not good enough. That's not perfect.
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  Next question. What's valuable to you about knowing that?
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  And finally, how can you push back
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  like Emily Dickinson did against your AI?
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  All right, that's it for today's episode of Human Print. Until next
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  time, 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 a
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  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 of
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  yourself do you need to protect the most? I'll see you next time.