HumanPrint: How to Use AI Without Losing Yourself
Sep 3, 2026 · 16 min · 9 segments
Has AI actually improved your writing process, or just changed it? This episode gives you a practical way to compare how you worked before generative AI with how you work now, so you can identify what…
Christine WhitmarshHostWhat have you changed because of the backlash around AI, even when there was nothing wrong with that part of your process in the first place? There is a P.J.
He was famously prolific and had a writing process that remained pretty consistent for decades.
It was described in a 1971 New Yorker profile that he wrote first drafts longhand in pencil and then moved to a royal typewriter he'd been using since 1934, revising as he typed.
At some point, he decided to try dictating a Jeeves and Wooster novel into a dictaphone.
Then he played it back, thought it sounded terrible, and immediately went back to his pencil and paper.
Try the thing, see what happens to your work, and if it helps, keep exploring it, but if it makes something worse, you now know something useful about your process.
The arrival of a new tool doesn't create an obligation to use it in every available way, and deciding one particular use doesn't work for you, that does not require declaring the entire technology as evil.
He just needed to know whether that dictaphone helped him write a funny novel.
That level of specificity, that would help us enormously right now if we all applied that.
So instead of asking whether AI makes writing better, ask what happened to your writing.
How did you used to get ideas? Where did they come from? Did you outline first or discover the idea while you were writing? How did you research? What happened when you got stuck? What did revision look like for you? Who got to see your rough drafts? Which parts of the process did you love and which ones did you mostly tolerate because they were necessary? How did you used to know the writing sounded like you? And what made something good, quote unquote, in your eyes before anybody was debating whether a machine might have touched it? These questions are your baseline, and that baseline is key right now because one of the stranger side effects of the AI backlash is that perfectly normal human writing habits are being retroactively classified as suspicious.
The em dash has obviously become the all-star celebrity example, and I say that as someone who was using the poor thing very happily long before it acquired this criminal punctuation record.
You know, there's the words, the bullet points, organized arguments, specific transitions, three-part structures, which is hilarious because I've always been obsessed with using groups of threes in my writing.
I've seen lists of AI tells that are so broad that I'm reasonably certain half of the English-speaking population could be detained for questioning.
Pull something you wrote in maybe 2015, 2005, whenever, 1990s, whenever you have enough distance to know that generative AI absolutely was not involved.
What have you changed because of the backlash around AI, even when there was nothing wrong with that part of your process in the first place? There is a P.J.
He was famously prolific and had a writing process that remained pretty consistent for decades.
It was described in a 1971 New Yorker profile that he wrote first drafts longhand in pencil and then moved to a royal typewriter he'd been using since 1934, revising as he typed.
At some point, he decided to try dictating a Jeeves and Wooster novel into a dictaphone.
Then he played it back, thought it sounded terrible, and immediately went back to his pencil and paper.
Try the thing, see what happens to your work, and if it helps, keep exploring it, but if it makes something worse, you now know something useful about your process.
The arrival of a new tool doesn't create an obligation to use it in every available way, and deciding one particular use doesn't work for you, that does not require declaring the entire technology as evil.
He just needed to know whether that dictaphone helped him write a funny novel.
That level of specificity, that would help us enormously right now if we all applied that.
So instead of asking whether AI makes writing better, ask what happened to your writing.
How did you used to get ideas? Where did they come from? Did you outline first or discover the idea while you were writing? How did you research? What happened when you got stuck? What did revision look like for you? Who got to see your rough drafts? Which parts of the process did you love and which ones did you mostly tolerate because they were necessary? How did you used to know the writing sounded like you? And what made something good, quote unquote, in your eyes before anybody was debating whether a machine might have touched it? These questions are your baseline, and that baseline is key right now because one of the stranger side effects of the AI backlash is that perfectly normal human writing habits are being retroactively classified as suspicious.
The em dash has obviously become the all-star celebrity example, and I say that as someone who was using the poor thing very happily long before it acquired this criminal punctuation record.
You know, there's the words, the bullet points, organized arguments, specific transitions, three-part structures, which is hilarious because I've always been obsessed with using groups of threes in my writing.
I've seen lists of AI tells that are so broad that I'm reasonably certain half of the English-speaking population could be detained for questioning.
Pull something you wrote in maybe 2015, 2005, whenever, 1990s, whenever you have enough distance to know that generative AI absolutely was not involved.
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