The Heart of Writing: Why Your Voice Still Matters in the Age of AI

This isn’t an article about the dangers of generative AI. Unless you’ve been living on a deserted island with no WIFI, no access to newspapers or magazines, and a decided lack of interest in the social mores of our time, you probably already know generative AI was built on the backs of stolen work, that the technology powering it is damaging the planet, and that it is, according to researchers at MIT, possibly killing people’s brain cells or at least stripping users of their ability to think critically.

(Why Your Character's Emotional Arc Matters More Than Your Perfect Plot.)

My feeling is you probably already know all of that. So, no, this isn’t an anti-AI article. It’s a pro-human one.

Lately I’ve been hearing from my students how scared they are that generative AI is going to replace them. And if you’re anything like my students, you might be worried, too.

It’s not an unfounded fear. People are flooding book retailers with whole novels generated by AI. Machine-written posts pop up all over my social media page with clearly AI-generated images with feel-good stories about a 10-year-old paper boy saving up his pennies to rescue an elderly dog, or “life lesson” type stories about a woman wearing a princess gown at the airport because she isn’t afraid to shine brighter and take up space.

These posts all have a certain style in common—lack of interiority, uniform grammar and structure, that same call to action at the end making up the moral of the story—commonalities that make them read as if they were all written by the same person. And in a way, they were. They were written by an amalgamation of all of us whose works were originally used to build the language-learning models, and by everyone who continues to put their work into the systems allowing it to evolve to write more like us.

And while the works are, to me at least, bland, generic, and wholly prosaic, it is clear by the thousands of likes many of these posts garner, that there is a market for something that can churn out work that is, more than anything else, instant and uninteresting.

But it’s that very uniformity and instant gratification of machine-written work that makes your weird, different, human-powered writing even more important in this age of AI. In a way, the onslaught of writing by people who are not writers, but simply computer-prompters has made me reevaluate my own work, to appreciate the slowness of my craft, to cherish the rambling sentences my editor often wants to cut. Machine writing is technically grammatically perfect, yes, but it isn’t unruly.

Your writing doesn’t have to be faster, cleaner, or more uniform. In fact, I’d argue that we are moving into an era where strangeness trumps cleanliness, where the human outweighs the humdrum, where leaning into your very soul means you’re producing works that defy banality. I, personally, am planning on leaning into my weird-as-a-way-of-life era. I’m going to keep producing my precariously built chapbooks, my non-linear novels, and my stories that take forever to find a home because they need that editor who is just a little bit out there to truly appreciate them. I’m going to keep writing from my soul.

People who draft with AI, people who produce stories and novels with AI, they aren’t tapping into their souls. AI might be able to write a surface essay about grief, but it wasn’t there when your father took his dying breath. AI can produce a story about a best friend’s laugh, but it can’t write about your best friend. It can’t delve into the life experiences that banded together to create the person who writes stories that can only be written by you. This is what we’re talking about when we say a piece has voice. It’s the joys and griefs of a life, it’s the lessons you learned, it’s the times you laughed so hard, your ribs hurt for days, or the nights you cried yourself to sleep and woke up with a ringing headache and a desolate emptiness. It’s all of your moments of despair, joy, lust, loneliness, and absolute wonder.

Those moments comprise your voice and when you put them on the page, readers can’t help but respond.

There are a lot of readers still out there who aren’t looking for uniform blandness. And still more, I think, who will come back from the newness of machine-prompted works to seek out human-soul writing. We are not machines. I am not a machine. I’m a slow writer. I’m messy, full of self-doubt. I’m an on-going work in progress and I think it’s safe to say I will never find perfection.

AI has made me realize I don’t even want perfection. I want to be too much. I want to be flawed and real and rambling.

If that’s also you—someone who writes weird, who writes messily, who sometimes goes weeks without writing because you’re afraid you’re not going to be able to pull it off, well, congratulations, you’re a human being. That complexity is part of being human. And that’s what makes your work so gloriously, uniquely you.

I don’t want to read uninteresting drivel someone made by telling a computer to tell them a story. I want to read something about you, something that came because you’ve lived, loved, and lost. I want to hear your voice in your words.

I don’t need AI, friends. I need you.