Thinking, Writing, and Creating for Ourselves in the Age of AI

(Without sounding like everyone else)

Photo by William Felipe Seccon on Unsplash

You know that feeling when you’re sitting with another creative person, and the conversation turns into this slow unspooling of ideas? One thought catches another, a memory drops in, a connection sparks — and suddenly you’re in that shared headspace where anything could be made.

That’s the space I want us in right now.

Because we’re living in an incredible, weird moment where tools like AI can both amplify our voices and risk dulling them. And as much as I love these tools — I use them daily — there’s still a question hanging in the air:

How do we protect our voice while using the tools that make life easier?

From the broadest view, thoughts aren’t something we grind out like stone. They’re more like a river — flowing, bending, picking up minerals from the land they pass through. In today’s world, that means all of the social media feeds, podcasts, rumors, theories, ideas, concepts, and plans we have throughout our lives. Our voice is in those bends: the little shifts that come from our own lived experience.

The danger (and beauty) of AI is that it doesn’t have a river of lived experience, but it has training data. It has a floodplain — a wide, shallow sprawl of every stream it’s been fed.

Simply put, AI is trained on the internet. It’s soaked in blog posts, news articles, product descriptions, recipe sites, comment sections, marketing copy — all the different “voices” of the past couple of decades of online writing. Many of those voices were crafted to sell something, grab attention, or sound like an expert. If you just let AI write for you, it will average all of that into something smooth, neutral, and safe — and in the process, it can wash away the bend that makes your river yours.

So the challenge is not “how do I avoid AI?” but how do I use it without losing myself?