Thinking out loud: AI, writing, and keeping your voice

I've always been a fan of writing. Putting words to my thoughts has always been how I make sense of my surroundings and process the things I experience. Sometimes that's been keeping a diary, sometimes a blog, sometimes just calling my people and going on shameless monologues about whatever I'm currently obsessed with. Letting my thoughts out into the world, verbally or written, makes them real. It makes me see them, untangle them and separate them from the constant swirl of everything else going on in my head.

But I’ve noticed myself getting lazy with this process and it makes me sad to think about how we all sound more and more like AI. Even the people that don't use AI are starting to sound like AI just because of all the AI generated content we all consume. 

With AI woven into how we work and communicate, it’s clear that we are quietly losing some of our producing capabilities. Not because the tools are bad, I use them and I'm not going to argue otherwise. It is also a requirement to know how to use AI in your everyday work life now, and standing on the side line is simply not an option for me. But there is a difference between using AI to free up time and using it to avoid the discomfort of finding your own words. More often than I'd like to admit I find myself scribbling down notes and running them through AI instead of sitting with the mess long enough to make sense of it myself. Then I regret it, because that mess is where my actual thinking and my sense making happens.

And what's been bugging me lately is what this does to our voices. I remember so clearly being able to tell from just the first sentences whether something had been written by my sister, a friend or a classmate and I can't always do that anymore. 

Maybe I simply don't read enough of what my friends and colleagues write these days (not the longer, more considered stuff, only emails and text messages) to really get to know their styles. But we all sound more and more the same too. And I think it's partly AI, but I think there's also a quiet anxiety involved that might come from a need to fit into the professional or social expectations of whatever platform or context we're operating in. When we have a tool that can proofread, optimise, and polish everything we produce in seconds, of course we use it if the result is correct and accurate and takes away the vulnerability of being yourself (and potentially being different). 

But it's a tricky balancing act. I am someone who both relies on AI in my writing process and genuinely mourns what it does to writing. I wrote about this briefly in my post about Almedalen as well, how this expectation of knowing how to use AI in an efficient and correct way competes with the notion of always having to be ready to also defend and motivate why and how you used it. 

For me, AI is an everyday tool I carry with me in most things I do professionally and creatively, but I am getting more and more aware of the areas of my life I need to protect from it. For me, that's the messy, slow, sometimes frustrating process of finding my own words. And also quite often these days, refraining from asking questions too early so that I can let myself or my friends find the answers through conversations instead of technology. 

The process of finding your own words and your own meaning is irreplaceable. 

And I just want to make sure I still know how I sound like and that my friends, family and colleagues recognise me.