HumanPrint: How to Use AI Without Losing Yourself
Jun 4, 2026 · 9 min · 8 segments
**What this episode is about** AI has become the most rigid, literal editor in the world—determined to stamp out your unique writing messiness every time you color outside the literary lines. But…
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Christine WhitmarshHostToday, let's talk about that urge we all have to fix the weird, unpolished parts of our writing.
So you might recall how I recently characterized AI as that writer who learns all the writing things yesterday and i- is eager to show them all off today, and show, wants to show us that it knows every single thing that's of exist- that's existed in the history of writing, all in one day, all in one output.
So as a result, AI seems to have adopted this role as the most rigid, literal editor in the world.
It's determined to stamp out our unique writing messiness every time we color outside the literary lines.
I mean, how dare we, right? AI might be the newest, strictest literal editor, but this idea is not new.
For instance, Emily Dickinson dealt with a similar situation with her editor, a guy named Thomas Wentworth Higginson, who was intent on fixing all the weird parts of her writing.
In a letter to Higginson, Dickinson wrote, "While my thought is undressed, I can make the distinction.
But when I put them in the gown, they look alike and numb." Her editor altered things like her unique punctuation and rhythm to make her poems more proper.
[chuckles] We post our random, disconnected, and messy thoughts, asking AI to make sense of our ramblings, and if we haven't trained it, if we haven't trained our chatbot, like when you're using, you know, the generic public kind of out-of-the-box LLMs like, um, ChatGPT and, um, Gemini and Claude, if you haven't really done any training without carefully kind of iterating, you know, on your, on your voice, what happens is that AI polishes away all your unique writing edges and produces a perfectly polished paragraph, a textbook piece of grammatical beauty, but something that really anyone could have written.
It didn't write it for you, not unless you're using a custom-trained AI like the ones we create at my company.
So yes, AI can make language smoother, but some of your real voice lives in the roughness, the tension between what your soul wants to say and how to say it.
It's the part that you think is unfinished, incomplete, or too personal to share with the world.
Now, these are the parts I've spent years convincing my book coaching clients to keep, their authentic voices without trying to sound perfect, quote unquote.
Today, let's talk about that urge we all have to fix the weird, unpolished parts of our writing.
So you might recall how I recently characterized AI as that writer who learns all the writing things yesterday and i- is eager to show them all off today, and show, wants to show us that it knows every single thing that's of exist- that's existed in the history of writing, all in one day, all in one output.
So as a result, AI seems to have adopted this role as the most rigid, literal editor in the world.
It's determined to stamp out our unique writing messiness every time we color outside the literary lines.
I mean, how dare we, right? AI might be the newest, strictest literal editor, but this idea is not new.
For instance, Emily Dickinson dealt with a similar situation with her editor, a guy named Thomas Wentworth Higginson, who was intent on fixing all the weird parts of her writing.
In a letter to Higginson, Dickinson wrote, "While my thought is undressed, I can make the distinction.
But when I put them in the gown, they look alike and numb." Her editor altered things like her unique punctuation and rhythm to make her poems more proper.
[chuckles] We post our random, disconnected, and messy thoughts, asking AI to make sense of our ramblings, and if we haven't trained it, if we haven't trained our chatbot, like when you're using, you know, the generic public kind of out-of-the-box LLMs like, um, ChatGPT and, um, Gemini and Claude, if you haven't really done any training without carefully kind of iterating, you know, on your, on your voice, what happens is that AI polishes away all your unique writing edges and produces a perfectly polished paragraph, a textbook piece of grammatical beauty, but something that really anyone could have written.
It didn't write it for you, not unless you're using a custom-trained AI like the ones we create at my company.
So yes, AI can make language smoother, but some of your real voice lives in the roughness, the tension between what your soul wants to say and how to say it.
It's the part that you think is unfinished, incomplete, or too personal to share with the world.
Now, these are the parts I've spent years convincing my book coaching clients to keep, their authentic voices without trying to sound perfect, quote unquote.
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