When AI Stole My Voice
This post is about writing, AI, and how I took it too far on a post on Medium. Ah well.
AI has been touted as a writing aid, but lately, it’s cramping my style. Instead of helping me get over my barriers, it’s making my process worse. 2000+ word tomes and tens of hours of research each week isn’t sustainable when you have kids and a job.
I hear the Siren’s song of AI for moments like this. I’ve been trying to figure out how to incorporate AI into my workflows for a while. It helps save time on emails, lightly edit my prose, write code, and do research for me. However, when I’m tired and trying to get a post up quickly, AI is a bright, shining beacon of potential, ready to help workshop ideas and quickly write prose.
I wrote a blog post about writing a few months ago using this technique. It was a research-backed twist on a popular productivity technique I use daily. I then collaborated heavily with Claude to refine and edit my writing. I even workshopped a few titles based on how well they’d perform. When I posted it on Medium, I was confident it would do well. Claude even agreed with me, saying it was a good and a “fresh take” on a new subject.
The post went nowhere. Less than 10 views in two weeks. I took it down, feeling the embarrassment burn through my cheeks. I didn’t write again for 2 weeks.
Why was I so ashamed of the content? No one had seen the post, so no one could see me fail. When I picked up the pen to explore why I felt this way, it hit me – the shame of overreliance on AI and killing my own instincts.
I over-edited the material with AI, aligning with the compressed “generic productivity” blogger representation in the LLM’s memory. Buried in the AI’s training data, it convinced me to drag myself away from my voice and authentic expressions. I did water that post down to sound like someone I’m not. Not refined or reflective of me.
This made me consider what we lose when we always aim for better or faster. Why do we use productivity tools in the first place? Task boards, AI systems, and Pomodoro timers – sure, they’re great systems to support work, but to what ends?
The process of doing hard things sucks. Sometimes you get stuck staring at a blank page with writer’s block. And there I see the call of AI to skip over that problem. But in writing that post, I convinced myself that the AI-assisted post was better than how I usually write.
Editing this draft the umpteenth time, there comes a delight in the thrashing – the rhythm of the keys, the puzzle of order, pacing, and prose I get to solve on each line. If I write through that, I find satisfaction on the other side.
The shortcuts of AI take away that struggle. There's no way to get to the experience of being a beginner without having gone through the process of learning and doing it yourself. While learning how to write this blog, I’m thrashing with my feelings to produce something, but it’s the process that helps me work through my thoughts. I learned that part of this process is learning to share what's in my head imperfectly, not gating what is a "relevant" piece of content for my "angle" that my "AI content strategy" has carefully analyzed.
I want to talk to you, dear reader, about AI, well-being, and the good life. Writing authentically is a good path for that outcome, without having to optimize for something that AI or a content strategy will think is effective.
So here I am. Working on another messy piece of prose. I hope I’m developing my style through this process, but ultimately, it sounds more like me.
I still have the crappy version of that post before AI turned me into a hybrid of Tim Ferris and motivational business coach, and I’d like to share it. It’s about brain dumps and how to use them to work through crappy feelings. Let me know in the comments if you want to see an updated version of that blog post.
I’d also love to hear about how you took AI too far in the comments.