The debate over AI-assisted writing is too simple. The real question is whether a writer owned the ideas, the judgment, and the voice.

I’ve always had more ideas than time.

Back in my ad agency days as a copywriter and creative director, the ideas weren’t the problem. Getting them out of my head and into something worth presenting was the work. Many ideas never saw the light of day.

AI has changed this. It helps me develop ideas and iterate more efficiently. Through conversation, research and feedback, I get more ideas to a much better place quickly.

I still rewrite. I still rearrange. I still question the logic and change words long after a draft is done (like tweaking a blog article on Saturday morning after publishing it on Friday).

But thanks to AI assistance, I can publish more and go deeper, getting to ideas that used to die on the vine.

When gen AI arrived in 2022, I wrote about where it should and shouldn’t be used without using it in my own writing process. Over time, that felt incomplete. To teach students how to use AI responsibly, I need to learn to use it thoughtfully and transparently myself.

By 2025, I began testing AI in my own writing process. My writting with AI has always been AI assistance, but there’s a lot of nuance to it.

How you use AI in writing matters, especially now that writers, editors, and publishers are increasingly worried that any AI use will cause thoughtful work to be dismissed as AI slop.

TheWall Street Journal has reported writers intentionally adding typos and removing their authentic voice to avoid being labeled as AI, comparing it to a “new McCarthyism.”

What Makes Writing Feel Like AI?

I listened to an interview with Max Spero, CEO of Pangram, one of the more sophisticated AI detection tools. When asked how it works, he described writing as a decision tree.

Every word, sentence, and structural choice sends you down a path. As a piece of writing gets longer, the number of possible paths grows. Yet large language models tend to make similar choices repeatedly. Spero described this tendency as “mode collapse.”

Think about a good conversation. You may begin with a topic, then wander into an unexpected story or follow a tangent that turns out to be more interesting than your original thought. Humans take tributaries. AI tends to steer back toward the center.

In his newsletter, Christopher S. Penn gives us another clue: surprise. AI-generated text often has a more regular rhythm, more predictable word choices, and fewer unusual turns.

Human voice lives in irregularities: an odd phrase, abrupt sentence, unexpected detail, or personal reference no one else would think to include.

Like a headline and subhead I once wrote for a health insurance client:

“Five great places to pass a kidney stone. No one plans for these things, that’s why we do.”

That unexpected turn won us the account and won the client new customers. AI would never write that line. Unexpected requires breaking from the predictable path, exactly what AI is trained against.

This doesn’t mean unusual writing is automatically good writing. A paragraph can be unpredictable and make no sense. But voice is not simply a vocabulary list. It comes from the accumulated choices you make as a writer.

The contrast has shown up in my LinkedIn feed. Why do many posts look the same now? Stacked single sentences. White space. Staccato pacing to pull you down the scroll.

I’ve followed some people for years and have read their work elsewhere. I’ve enjoyed their distinct writing styles. It’s sad to see some of that voice disappear as AI nudges more writers toward the predictable path. People have always considered the algorithm. But AI makes that optimization faster, more confidently, and available to all with an easy click.

AI Can Flatten Writing

At one end of the scale, someone types a prompt, copies the answer, and publishes it without much thought. The ideas may not be theirs. The examples may not be real. No one checks the facts or questions whether the piece is worth publishing.

At the other end, a writer brings an original idea and uses AI as a research assistant, editor, or thought partner. The writer tests the argument, rejects generic suggestions, rewrites sections, adds personal experience, and takes responsibility for each decision and fact. They’re not the same process.

AI use is on a scale that shouldn’t be flattened into a simple label.

There’s also an important distinction between writers at different stages of development. For a student or less experienced writer still finding a voice, the rough draft and other parts of the process still need to be theirs.

The struggle of shaping an argument isn’t wasted time. It’s how judgment develops. Experienced writers may lose some skills to AI, but too much cognitive offloading in students means they may never develop them.

This distinction became clearer listening to Mitch Joel’s conversation with communication coach Carmine Gallo. He makes an important point about great communicators.

What looks effortless rarely is. A Steve Jobs keynote may have felt simple, natural, and spontaneous. But it was the product of hours of planning, preparation, feedback, and practice. The ease was earned through repetition.

With AI, students and young professionals can produce something polished without putting in the reps that build the underlying skill. The danger isn’t only AI flattenning their voice. It may prevent them from developing one in the first place. An MIT study on essay writing with ChatGPT called this risk “cognitive debt.”

Some friction keeps an idea trapped in your head. But other friction is how you learn to think, write, and communicate. Outsource too much too early, and you may never build the judgment you’ll need when an AI answer is wrong, generic, or not good enough.

How Do You Protect Your Voice?

Throughout the writing process, I keep asking:

Am I reacting to the AI, or is the AI reacting to me?

Did I bring the idea, the story, the analogy, the point of view? Or did AI give me an idea and I simply made it sound a little more like me?

Each choice matters. Don’t let AI decide your opening story before you have one. Don’t accept the obvious analogy because it arrived quickly. Don’t let AI arrange every thought into the same polished structure.

Even when the original words are yours, AI can flatten your voice by arranging those words into a more predictable pattern. Penn makes a memorable example with Yoda from Star Wars. AI would rearrange Yoda’s words into a conventional sentence structure. The meaning remains, but Yoda disappears.

It’s a subtle risk. The ideas and message could still be yours while the writing becomes less recognizably yours. AI can be a good editor. But a good human editor, like my editor at Bloomsbury, knows not to turn every writer into the same writer.

The headline of this blog article became an example. AI confidently suggested a more grammatically polished version:

“How to Write With AI Without Losing Your Voice — or Your Judgment.”

I kept coming back to “losing your choice or flattening your voice.” The choice / voice rhyme felt more memorable to me, probably because of my years writing advertising headlines. It may not be perfectly constructed. But it sounds more like something I would write and say.

Without confidence in my own writing voice, I might have easily abdicated that decision. Sometimes the slightly unexpected phrase is not a flaw to smooth away. It is the voice.

ChatGPT said my phrasing was awkward. But it delivered that advice with personal language: “My favorite…” “My recommendation…” You have to remember there’s no person behind the “my.” AI is not my human editor, no matter how confident it sounds.

You still have to be the human in the room. Trust your intuition, draw on your experience, and check everything.

More than once, AI has confidently given a statistic, a source, or a link that sounded like what I was looking for. Only when I questioned it did Gemini, ChatGPT, and Claude apologize and acknowledge that the source didn’t exist.

AI can help find a lead. That doesn’t relieve you of the responsibility to open the link, verify the claim, and decide whether the evidence supports your point. See below for ChatGPT admitting it’s limitations.

Assistance Is Not Replacement

Writers have never worked entirely alone. Books have editors. Academic articles have reviewers. Journalists have fact checkers. Copywriters have creative directors and proof readers. I really miss those proof readers!

I became a better writer because other people challenged my work, questioned my logic, and told me when an idea wasn’t there yet. AI can play a useful supporting role. It can identify an unclear paragraph, find a source, suggest a counterargument, or help a writer get unstuck.

AI assistance is different from publishing thousands of synthetic posts under fake names or filling the internet with auto-generated comments no human thought deeply about.

At the same time, readers should know when AI played a meaningful role. Disclosure matters. But collapsing every kind of AI assistance into a single category doesn’t help us think more clearly about authorship.

Using AI to write gives us more power to develop ideas, follow new tributaries, and get thoughts into the world that might otherwise not make it. But that power comes with responsibility. We have to make the important choices. We have to protect our voice, verify our sources, question the confident answer, and remain accountable for what we publish.

If you want to write something worth reading, you still have to be the human in the room.

The central idea for this post was mine. I used ChatGPT and Claude as thought partners to test the argument, identify possible supporting sources, and follow new tributaries opened by listening to the Spero interview, reading Penn’s newsletter and Joel’s conversation with Carmine Gallo. I opened and checked AI sources before using them. I rewrote, reorganized, added, cut, and edited through multiple rounds. That included rejecting smoother suggestions when a less predictable phrase (the headline’s choice / voice rhyme) sounded more like me. The experiences, ideas, opinions, and final decisions are my own.