AI and the need for your authentic voice

I’ve been peeking at some of the futurism being discussed around AGI and thinking about some of the worst case scenarios. I don’t have much to add to these. Like climate change or the threat of nuclear war, I find myself in a state of acedia about how things might end. More directly energizing to me, while I am on this earth, is the way in which AI can help or hinder my own creativity. This article on that topic by Francesco Agnellini is a good one, showing how much writing on the web is now generated by AI.

As a writer I have always been quite seduced by voice and after reading certain people, I can find myself adopting elements of theirs. For example, If I read too much John O Donohue right before penning a sermon or a poem of blessing, I run the risk of appropriating his incredible richness. I have my own voice, but my goodness, his makes me want to write everything in that way!

It’s clear to me that ChatGPT – the LLM I am most familiar with – has a distinct voice. I don’t know how I would describe it exactly. Musicians will understand perhaps when I say it has a Lydian mode, a kind of underlying brightness no matter what the subject, the tension is raised out of it creating an optimistic and sunny tone. It’s one reason why I avoid using it as a creative writing partner because if I put my writing to it, I can find myself beginning to sound that way.

I’m certain now I can recognize writing that has this voice in articles, whether entirely written by the robot, drafted and shaped by it and an author or even just influenced by how ChatGPT has provided material to the author. LinkedIn is a good source of this stuff. The degree of homogeneity in an optimistic tone of voice is Borg-like in its vibes.

Francesco Agnellini posits that human writing might be even more valuable in a world dominated by this kind of slop. I think that is true as well. But for it to be valuable, it needs to be practiced. I absolutely love reading writing that is in the voice of the author, especially people I know. Writing longer form blog posts and articles is good practice. It keeps your voice fresh and distinctive. It trains your style to be the default mode for how you express yourself. In the end it gestures towards your authenticity and therefore your trustworthiness.

I’m not interested in how clever your AI prompts are. I’m interested what comes out of your fingers or your mouth when you think about something and offer it up into the world.

Human writing is needed. It goes right to the heart. Whether fiction or poetry or non-fiction or biography, we are made human by story shaped by beauty and experience. And not just by reading them, by telling them as well.

If you are letting LLMs tell your story, even a part of it, I fear for you. On LinkedIn you can watch real people disappear in real time first into a facade of marketing-speak and then behind the door of auto-generated slop.

Sometimes people point out typos in my blog posts, and I appreciate that because it tells me they are reading. Since I was a little kid I have always had trouble spotting typos and spelling mistakes. I’m happy to correct them, but I want to offer that you should be delighted to read them. Peehaps errors in a blog post should be cause for celebration: a person wrote that.

So write. Write every day and share it, mistakes and all, so we can find each other in this increasingly tangled thicket of artifice and grift.