Interlude: The Problem with AI No One Is Talking About

Not even after more than a million words...

Last week, I intended to get into a regular writing and posting schedule, but life happened.

Actually, deadlines happened. Yes, at the start of January. Rude.

I’m teaching a continuing education course on writing for my fellow mental health professionals next Wednesday the 21st. The platform I teach for was bought last year, and CE approval standards have changed, so I had to update my references and revise my slides, all 100+ of them. :headdesk:

Yeah…

One area that needed the most revision was going from a single slide on robot writing (initials A.I.) to a whole section. I did find the references to be interesting, particularly since I have one foot in the entrepreneurial business world, which tends to be robot-positive, and one in the mostly anti-robot creative world.

I guess I could say I have another foot in the psychotherapy world, but that’s one foot too many. No wonder I feel overwhelmed.

One area that no one seems to be talking about is how using generative AI to write hinders development as a writer. Okay, sure, there’s that recent study about how it makes you remember less and less able to string coherent sentences together, but I’m referring to something deeper.

If I were to continue the anatomy metaphor—and really, when talking about AI, having three feet actually works—

Oh, crap, I just used em-dashes. Now y’all will think I’m having a GPT write this.

But if you look at my books, of which I published 20+ before I started playing with ChatGPT, you’ll see they’re full of em-dashes. That sentence style is part of my writer voice.

That’s what I was going to say… Back to the topic, ADHD brain.

NO ONE in the entrepreneurial writing space is talking about author voice.

Not that I’m surprised. Most book coaches in the business world are all about, “write your book in X days.” They don’t care about helping their clients develop as writers or connecting with the deep magic of creativity. Nope, just write a book you can throw out there so people think you know what you’re doing, and do it as quickly as possible. They can also give you their templates and methods that have worked for the many clients they’ve helped publish mediocre books that are “bestselling” because they know how to game the algorithm.

Barf.

Yes, I just wrote Barf. No, I don’t mean the Spaceballs character.

Now the trend is to train an AI to write like you so you can put out your mediocre book even faster, and, I dunno, fool people that you actually wrote it? Yeah, let’s add to the technology’s ethical issues that already include environmental destruction and plagiarism.

I’ve played with having an AI write like me, and yes, it gets close, but it’s still not me. It’s missing something I can’t define.

The bigger problem is that if you use AI to write for you, you’re not developing as a writer.

Again for the people clutching their cyberpearls and GPT’s in the back…

IF YOU’RE USING GENERATIVE AI TO WRITE FOR YOU, YOU’RE NOT GROWING AS A WRITER.

What is a writer’s voice?

This is a great question and lands in the space of overlapping psychology and creative mysticism.

One of my writing students shared a New York Times article with me and her cohort on how AI voice is homogenizing the written word landscape, and not in a good way. Here’s the link. It’s behind a paywall, but you may be able to access it through your library. That’s what I did.

One interesting thing was that the article’s author used AI to write his opening paragraph, and I found myself skimming it even before I knew that’s what he’d done. Something in our brains picks up computer voice and recoils from the lack of soul behind the words.

Your author voice conveys your authentic self and makes your writing unique. When you’ve developed it, someone can pick up and read something you’ve written and know it’s you, even if your name isn’t on it. This may be why I haven’t penned that sapphic space alien erotica yet. My author voice, especially with this pen name, is pretty developed, and I can’t not write in it.

Yes, sapphic space erotica. Maybe a parody like Spaceballs? No, I’m not discussing it.

How do you develop your writer voice?

The simple and hard answer: you write.

When I started out in the writing world, the generally accepted knowledge was that you need to write a million words before you truly sound like yourself. I don’t know if that’s true, but I agree, you need to write to figure out how you write, how you think, and how you convey information—fiction or nonfiction—in a way that’s uniquely yours.

When you begin writing, you’re going to sound like your biggest author influences—hence why I was both thrilled and dismayed that someone said my Lycanthropy Files books reminded them of Anne McCaffrey’s Dragonriders of Pern series. No, I don’t have dragons in my werewolf books (maybe someday…), but she’s my favorite author, so it doesn’t surprise me that her influence showed.

The problem with thinking you can train your GPT to sound like you is that the process of author voice development, like muscle development, isn’t conscious. You can lift weights and build muscle, but you’re not consciously directing the breakdown and rebuilding of the individual fibers.

As you write and get through stuck points and thorny bits—e.g., “This isn’t conveying exactly what I want to say”—you’re breaking down and rebuilding your creative expression fibers. Progress comes through practice, and you can’t replace that with a computer.

Can I define what makes my author voice unique?

Nope. Neither can a Large Language Model.

Sure, I can go back and look at what I’ve written and see patterns, but my author voice is, if you’ll excuse the cliché, greater than the sum of its parts.

For example, my editor and I joke about my tendency to write long, convoluted sentences. Now that I’m considering how my books will translate to audio as I write, I’ve cut way back on those multi-phrase monsters, which are tough for narrators to read. I also found them to be a challenge when I narrated the audio for one of my nonfiction books.

But even though I’ve mostly eliminated that writerly tendency, my author voice is still mine.

That’s why it’s difficult for famous authors to publish under a new pen name and keep it a secret. Readers know their voice, and now they can confirm it through data analysis.

Sure, even if a program can analyze what you’ve written so it can try to sound like you, you’re missing an all-important piece, that ineffable thing that makes you, well, you. That whole that is bigger than the combination of your experiences, thought patterns, and expertise.

Again, the only way to develop and deepen your author voice is to practice. That is, to write without outsourcing your creative process and its expression to a machine.

Y’all know that I’m all about Values, and one of my big ones is authenticity.

Just as I couldn’t connect to that opening paragraph of the New York Times piece, readers can tell when we’re being authentic and when we’re not. An AI that writes like you still isn’t you, and your readers, especially if they’re already part of your audience, will feel that.

So, even if you’re only interested in non-creative product (barf, brah) and not creative process, drafting a book using AI will work against you because it will turn off many readers.

Finally, regardless of whether we’re writing fiction or nonfiction, through writing, we connect in a deeper way with what we’re writing about and make associations that an AI never would. That’s where we find the fun, joy, and magic of creating.

It’s sad when your readers can’t connect with the spirit of your writing. It’s tragic when you lose it or give it away. Don’t let the machines stunt your writing development or steal your joy.

I’m curious as to how you understand writer/author voice and how you’re developing yours, if you are a writer. Yes, it’s an ongoing process. Please comment and let me know your thoughts below.

P.S. If you’re a mental health professional, and you want to score three continuing education units and be entertained (apparently I’m hilarious) while learning the basics of writing a nonfiction book, check out this class I’m teaching (as other me) on January 21, 2026.