Last week I published a piece about AI and authorship. Two readers pushed back on it. Both of them were right.
The first said that when you adopt the standard AI shape, single sentences spaced out under bold headers, your own voice gets watered down until your ideas stop looking like yours. The second said the piece was formulaic and padded, and that a few minutes of editing would have cut most of the word count without losing the message.
I did not enjoy reading either comment. I also could not argue with them.
So I took the criticism back to Claude, along with the published piece, and asked a simple question. What can you tell me about this?
Then I asked it to go further. Read my old writing. Blog posts from 2015 and 2016, drafts from before that, anything in the archive.
It came back with two things I had not thought about in years.
The first mention of AI anywhere in my files is July 2023. Everything before that date is just me, working alone, for better or worse. The second finding was that somewhere around July 2018 my tone shifts. I had an editor then. You can still see her in those sentences.
That is a strange experience, having a machine describe your own writing back to you.
Two lessons came out of it, and neither one is flattering.
I never set the tool up to sound like me. I handed it a rough dictated draft and let it decide the shape. What came back was competent, organized, and generic, which is exactly what you should expect when you do not tell it otherwise. That is not a failure of the tool. That one belongs to me.
The second lesson is that I can do better at this, and it is learnable work. There is a real difference between using AI to help me say something and letting AI decide how the thing gets said. I had blurred that line without noticing I was blurring it.
On the formatting, I will admit I had a reason. I read most of this on my phone, where the environment is scroll and scan, and short lines survive there. But if the format that survives the scroll is the same format everyone else is using, what exactly is surviving?
I am still going to use AI. For those of us working alone, it remains one of the more useful tools I have found in years. What changes is how much of the setup I take responsibility for before I ever ask it to write anything.
We are all early in this. I think the people who do it well will not be the ones who avoid the tools, and probably not the ones who hand everything over either. They will be the ones who keep asking whether the words still sound like them.
Mine did not, last week. Two readers were kind enough to say so.
What would you have told me? I’d love to know your thoughts.