Latest / HumanPrint: How to Use AI Without Losing Yourself / When Your Writing Stops Sounding Like You

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When Your Writing Stops Sounding Like You · 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
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  you are 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 is brought to
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  you by Abby AI Brand bank intelligence that helps
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  authors, thought leaders and enterprise teams train AI
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  on their voice and point of view so written content stays unmistakably
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  human, consistent and on brand. Learn more at abby.ink
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  abbi.ink like you write with.
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  Let's begin.
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  Hi everybody and welcome to Human Print. Welcome, welcome.
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  Brand new podcast here. So here's what's happening
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  right now in the world of AI. It feels to me like
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  everybody in their neighbor is using generative AI,
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  otherwise known as gen AI, to write. Like every little thing. You've seen it,
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  right? Mostly social media, but I also see it in email,
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  newsletters, website copy, really anywhere you see words.
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  And the appeal makes total sense. I mean, you type a prompt, you get something
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  polished back to you in seconds and you just like, move on with your
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  day. Right? I get it. I use AI in my own work. I mean,
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  I've built an entire mathematically calibrated voice intelligence system around it.
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  More on that later. But here's what I'm seeing in my inbox
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  every day from clients, other writers, from people I follow online whose
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  work I used to recognize instantly. I was, oh, that's that person. I love how
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  they talk. Their stuff is starting to sound the same. It's competent,
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  it's polished, it's fine. But less and less like them. And most of
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  them, I don't know if they've not noticed yet or what the deal is,
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  or they don't care. But that's what I want to talk about today. I want
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  to talk about drift. And I'm not talking about a full blown identity
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  crisis. Drift and identity crisis are two entirely different
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  things. When I say drift, I'm talking about the communication kind
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  of. The kind that starts so small you'd miss it if you weren't really paying
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  attention. Maybe like the people in the email newsletters, a phrase
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  borrowed here, a thought handed off there, a little nudge towards smoother,
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  faster, easier. Then one day you read something you wrote or posted or
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  sent to a client and you're like, I think this is fine.
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  But fine is the problem. Because fine could belong
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  to anyone. That's drift. And Genai has made
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  drift faster, easier and harder to catch.
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  Before AI Drift happened much more slowly. I mean, you'd pick
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  up business jargon from your industry or therapy jargon from your therapist, or,
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  you know, your favorite TV show or influencer jargon from whoever was getting
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  the most play that week. I mean, as humans, we've been borrowing language forever.
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  As a ghostwriter of 25 years, believe me, I get that. I'm like a walking
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  sponge. But AI accelerates the cycle because it
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  can generate so much polished, plausible language so quickly.
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  And it's literally been trained on everyone else's language.
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  So when you let it do too much of the work, you're not getting your
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  version of the idea. You're getting, like, the Internet's average
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  version, like, regression to the mean, you know, like, but with better grammar.
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  So a lot of people right now are focused on the big, flashy AI questions.
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  Is it good? Is it bad? Will it replace us? Should we use it?
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  How much? What are the best prompts? What are the best hacks? What's the tool
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  for the tool? Until your brain wants to check out of the noise and take
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  a nap. Not that naps are bad. I'm like a huge fan of naps,
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  you know, but for people whose work depends on language,
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  judgment, ideas, perspective, taste, and discernment,
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  your actual self showing up in the work,
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  the danger isn't nearly as blockbuster summer disaster
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  movie as the headlines might suggest. The danger of delegating
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  all your communication to AI without remaining firmly in
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  the driver's seat. Well, that looks like drift. I recently wrote
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  an article for substack and LinkedIn. It's called the three V's. V as in what
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  ghostwriters know about AI that everyone else is learning the hard way.
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  The core idea in the article is that AI collaboration
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  works when you bring three things to it. Vision, vantage, point, and voice.
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  Did I mention I'm like a huge fan of alliteration? Without those three things,
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  AI doesn't make you strategic. It just makes you faster at being
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  scattered and sounding less like yourself. Drift is what happens when
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  you skip those three things and you go straight to speed. You're producing more,
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  but you're saying less. Your output looks like progress, but it kind of really isn't.
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  I'm coming to this again from a career as a ghostwriter, a book coach,
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  and a personal brand storyteller. Like 25, I think.
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  Years of sitting across from people and figuring out how they actually sound
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  when they are telling their truth. So I notice when language starts drifting,
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  because that's the thing I'm trained to Hear. It's a difference between that's what I
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  said and that's what I really meant. So drift tends
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  to show up in language first, in things like cadence, phrasing,
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  you know, those tiny little word swaps away from your natural way of writing
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  that make you. That. You know, make you. You without thinking about them.
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  The sentence you would have written a certain way, maybe, like, a little messy.
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  Very much you. It becomes a sentence that sounds a little bit more correct.
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  Very correct, very professional. A little more, you know, like,
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  approved by that little invisible editing committee in your head that, like,
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  this is how I'm supposed to sound in public. Before long, your work starts sounding
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  less like a living mind and more like it rolled off an assembly line of
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  agreeable sentences. Maybe you've used AI to brainstorm
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  or tighten something up, and then you read the output and you're like, okay,
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  technically, this is better, but it could belong to almost anyone. If you took your
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  name off the post or the article or whatever, would anyone know it came from
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  your brain? So here's a distinction
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  I want to make, because not all change is drift. If your voice evolves,
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  great. If your ideas deepen, awesome. If your writing
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  gets stronger, sharper, more disciplined, amazing. I'm absolutely not
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  in the camp that many are in telling people to write badly on purpose so
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  people won't think it's A.I. the distinction I'm making is you versus
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  not you. I'm gonna say that again. The distinction I'm making with drift
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  is you versus versus, not you. And your ideas and
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  way of communicating them are constantly evolving, right? Like we're humans.
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  Growth is not drift. Neither is experimentation or learning.
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  Drift is unexamined, like, unnoticed, like invisible movement
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  away from your own unique identity signal.
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  I'm talking about intentionality, movement happening without enough of
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  your editorial choices, your intentional choices inside of that movement.
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  When you start absorbing other styles of writing that aren't you. Because it feels easier
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  and faster than taking those few extra minutes to find yourself in your writing.
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  Your point of view, your language. That's the problem. I think
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  a lot of people are doing exactly that right now with AI without realizing it,
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  because it's. Believe me, it's a lot less stressful than facing a blank screen and
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  a blinking cursor and forcing yourself to, like, sit in that liminal space between
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  having a thought and communicating it in words.
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  Hello. Welcome to writing. And again, I've been helping authors
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  fight blank pages for 25 years. But if you're not
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  paying attention, that reduction in friction can cost you because
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  Some of the things that make your work yours live in that friction, that discomfort.
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  A lot of what makes your work yours lives in the pause
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  where you have to decide what you actually mean. When's the last time you thought
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  about that? Your rhythm, your emphasis, your storytelling instincts,
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  the examples you reach for, the things you notice about life and people
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  before other people do, and the specific way your brain threads one idea to
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  the next. And in my case, epic run on sentences. That's one of my signature
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  tells. So if you automate past all of that, that whole thinking
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  process too quickly, what you might get might be efficient. But then one day
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  you read something with your name on it and you don't recognize it as your
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  own. Like, oh, I don't think I wrote that. I wrote about this
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  in that article, my 3vs article. The idea that once AI starts producing fluent,
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  polished, persuasive language at scale, the scarce thing
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  isn't content anymore. The scarce thing. If we think of, like,
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  scarcity versus abundance, the scarce thing is recognizable human signal.
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  Your judgment, your taste, your lived experiences, your technically accurate
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  but not really mine reflex. If you're using AI
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  to write and you don't have a clear vision for what you're building, a vantage
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  point for how to direct the machine and a voice you understand well enough to
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  protect, well, you're just kicking out content for speed. And you might be drifting
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  further from your own writing voice without realizing it.
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  So here's a drift check. Let's make this practical. Let's make this real.
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  If you're walking right now, or driving or unloading the dishwasher,
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  or pretending to listen to someone else while secretly listening to me. Thank you.
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  Just stick this question on a mental post it and come back to it later.
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  What in your work sounds fine on paper but
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  doesn't sound like you anymore? I'll do that again.
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  What in your work, your writing work sounds fine on paper,
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  but doesn't sound like you anymore. I don't mean
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  something obviously wrong. Something that's like way off. Just something that sounds like a little
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  bit off, a little authorless, a little like there's no human being in the middle
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  of it. You read it back to yourself out loud and part of you is
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  like, ah, yeah. No, I used to see something like this when I was coaching
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  fiction authors. I would challenge them, especially with, like, they had more than one character,
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  which is like, I think all fiction. I'd challenge them to take a dialogue scene
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  with multiple characters talking and strip out all the character names.
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  Then I would make them read it out loud. Now, if you can't tell who's
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  speaking without the name tag telling you, then your characters don't have distinct voices.
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  They're all kind of bleeding into one voice. And that's what drift does.
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  That's drift. Except now it's not fictional characters losing their
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  edges, it's you. So here's your human print homework.
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  Here's what I want you to do this week. Pick one place in your content
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  creation process, you know, social media, email, whatever, where convenience is
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  making a decision that you should be making. Just one. Maybe it's your first
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  draft or your subject lines or the way you summarize your ideas,
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  or maybe it's tone. If tone is where your writing is really you,
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  that's maybe the part you stop delegating. And here's a small one that makes a
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  big difference. Before you use AI to help with something, take just 60 seconds,
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  take a minute and write down, hand write what you think first,
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  just so your own mind enters the room before you let the machine in.
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  You know what I'm saying? Before you let the tool in. Because one of the
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  easiest ways to catch drift is to make sure you're not skipping your own first
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  thought. Your first thought. That's the thing that has your human signal. Even when
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  it's like messy or weird or crazy or incomplete, that's your human signal, that first
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  thought that comes into your head before you write a social media post, an email,
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  a blog post, an article, whatever. I feel like with AI,
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  there's like this sudden allergy to messy and incomplete and weird. You know, I'd love
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  to see all of us remember about the beauty that is found in the mess.
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  So before you send, post, publish or otherwise unleash
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  your words upon the world this week, ask yourself two questions. One,
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  what in here sounds specifically like me? And two,
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  what in here could have come from almost anyone?
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  That's it. You don't need a 47 point identity audit. You just need to
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  start noticing whether the stuff you're putting out there sounds like you. Because if drift
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  can start small, repair and like return away from drift, that can
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  start small too. So if you notice drift, that's not a failure.
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  You can, you can't really protect what you're not paying attention to. So just congratulate
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  yourself on the awareness for now. Don't turn this into another thing to beat
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  yourself up about. This is drift insurance. I'm just, I'm like your insurance, your drift
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  insurance broker. I'm helping you set it up. Just notice, get curious
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  pay attention to where your work still has your fingerprints on it and where
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  it's starting to look factory finished. All right,
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  that's it for today's episode of Human Print. I hope you'll continue tuning in.
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  We have a lot to explore this day and age about writing and keeping
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  your human identity signal intact. So 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, please follow
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  the show. And before you go, take a minute and ask yourself, as the AI
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  noise grows louder and louder, which areas of yourself do
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  you need to protect the most? I'll see you next time.