Who Composed the Sentence? Keeping Your Voice in the Age of AI

The age of AI has given us plenty of new tools and techniques to simplify our workload. I have personally seen poor writers who have greatly increased their writing accuracy through the use of AI, including grammar checkers and autocorrect. The real value is understanding how to avoid AI slop and use the AI to effectively increase our functionality and output.

The wrong question

The question comes up often: How much of this writing is me? How much of this writing is AI?

AI is a valuable tool for research, for consolidating knowledge, for creating an outline, for bullet points, and many other aspects of the mechanical side of writing. But when it comes to writing the actual prose (that is, the sentences that are going to be read), AI has a lot of slop.

There are recent articles on how AI is putting fingerprints into the writing that can be easily detected and then AI can then be used to determine what text is being written by AI and what text is being written by a human. Previously we would have talked about the percentages: this is 60% human, this is 80% human, but that's really a difficult thing to actually document and understand.

Who composed the sentence?

A better approach is to ask yourself who's writing the sentences. Again, the actual words that are being generated, the sentence structure, the punctuation, all of that: if it comes from a human, it's human-generated. Using the AI to do the researching, the outlining, and the bullet points can come from anywhere, as long as it doesn't touch the voice. The voice is the actual sentences being generated.

As a tool to do research, AI saves time. It makes research quick and easy and actually has a depth of availability that a human would take hours to do.

As a tool for brainstorming, for consolidation of thoughts, for organizing things, AI again saves time. One value of AI is that it can remember all the different points in a conversation. For example, in writing a fictional book, AI can help you remember what characters did and certain activities at certain points in time so you can keep your threads, your story arcs, in check. In short AI can be a writing assistant.

But the voice comes from the writer. If the AI writes the sentence, the voice is the AI. If the human writes the sentence, the voice comes from the human.

Why it matters more than it sounds

The current state of AI is in flux. Recent lawsuits about who has ownership of the AI-generated content and who has been compensated properly for the training of the AI are all topics that are being legislated. They may or may not have an effect on the overall AI slop and writing but at the end of the day what you call your content matters. It needs to be from you. Overreliance on AI for this part of your work can lead to problems down the road, especially with the AI training on generative content.

Before you feed it anything

Think about what's influencing your actual writing. Are you copying somebody else's sentence structure? Are you plagiarizing somebody else's work? If that's the case you don't own it. The same thing is true with the AI. If the AI is generating the content or even outlining the sentence structures themselves, you can't claim full ownership. Ownership comes from getting the thoughts in your head out to the words that you're writing. Whether you're using automated tools like Wispr to generate this, that's a different story but the actual words need to be from you.