writing

How to Write with AI Without Losing Your Choice or Flattening Your Voice

A guide to writing with AI.
~ K. Quesenberry ~ Leave a comment

The debate over AI-assisted writing is too simple. The real question is whether a writer still 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 sections. 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 version of using AI to write has always been AI assistance, but it’s not the only version.

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.

A recent Wall Street Journal article found that some writers are intentionally adding typos and removing their authentic writing voice to avoid being labeled as AI, comparing it to a “new McCarthyism.”

What Makes AI 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 the irregularities: an odd phrase, an abrupt sentence, an unexpected detail, or a 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, we do.”

That unexpected turn won us the account and won the client new customers. This doesn’t mean odd 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.

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 of quick judgment.

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. Adults may lose some skills to AI, but too much cognitive offloading in students means they may never develop them.

Click the image to download a PDF of this guide. ChatGPT helped create the graphic.

This distinction became clearer while listening to Mitch Joel’s conversation with communication coach Carmine Gallo. Gallo 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, fine-tuning, 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 that AI may flatten 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. AI can help remove that. 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 the AI answer is wrong, generic, or not good enough.

How Do You Protect Your Voice?

Throughout the writing process, I keep asking myself:

Am I reacting to AI, or is 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. Your ideas can remain 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 original phrasing was awkward. But it delivered that advice using personal language: “My favorite…” “My recommendation…” You have to remember that there’s no person behind the “my.” AI is not my human editor, no matter how confidently it sounds like one.

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

More than once, AI has confidently given me a statistic, a source, or a link that sounded like what I was looking for. Only when I questioned it did it apologize and acknowledge that the source did not 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 AI’s admission of it’s limitations.

A screen shot of a ChatGPT response.
A look into the process of working with AI on this article.

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.

I became a better writer because other people challenged my work, questioned my logic, and told me when an idea was not 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.

AI use disclosure: 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 Christopher Penn’s newsletter and listening to Mitch Joel’s conversation with Carmine Gallo. I opened and checked AI found sources myself before using them. I then 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.

Joy Interrupted: AI Can Distract From Opportunities For Learning And Human Connection.

An image of a poster promoting the Ross Gay even on a college campus.
~ K. Quesenberry ~ 1 Comment

This is the fifth post in a series of five on AI. My last post discussed why we need more than prompt engineers, but also subject matter experts. This post discusses the danger of losing that learning if AI is not used in the best ways.

Last spring, I went to a campus reading from New York Times best-selling author and poet Ross Gay. It was well attended by faculty, administrators, employees, community members, and students. In front of me, three students sat with two on laptops and one on a phone. My first thought was a professor required attendance and they were taking notes for an assignment.

A great opportunity on campus was this author’s reading and book signing.

 

Ross began drawing me in with engaging stories of happiness and sorrow and simple delights found in life if we pay attention. He’s a master observer of joy found in everyday moments. His message and delivery were powerful, yet, my attention was soon distracted by the busy screens in front of me.

Glancing down it was obvious the students weren’t taking notes. They didn’t look up at the author at all. The student in the middle was watching a video on the phone. The two on laptops were jumping back and forth between different websites, documents, emails, and social media.

Despite Ross’s dramatic reading, I had trouble focusing with three screens flitting around in front of me. I imagined what it’s like to be a student in the back of a lecture hall or even a small classroom with dozens of student multitasking screens in front of them.

AI promises to free us from busy work.

Between the author’s readings, I glanced down again, hoping to find evidence of something related to the event and this author. Instead, I noticed the ChatGPT screen. Maybe the student was using it to supplement an assignment or get help with a difficult task. Perhaps I’d see how a professor integrated AI into a class.

Instead, I saw quiz questions from the university learning management system. Each question and answer was quickly copied back and forth between ChatGPT and a course quiz. Twenty questions were answered in less than a minute. I saw no effort to answer questions first or even read them. Did the student not know this was wrong? Or were they so engrossed in the screen that they forgot their surroundings? Perhaps the student views quizzes as busy work, not a learning tool to ensure reading and internalizing information.

AI promises to free us from drudgery to explore human creativity and imagination. The article “How AI can save you time: 5 skills you no longer need to learn,” tells us we can now skip learning skills like writing because AI will do writing like reports and news articles for us. I wonder what creativity the journalist will explore when Euro News outsources articles to AI. I don’t want to be freed from writing. My creativity and imagination are explored through writing and evidence tells us writing is how we learn.

If the student in front of me was using AI to save time to explore human creativity, they missed one of the best opportunities that semester. While they focused on their screen using AI, a poet expressed the joy of being human moving some in the room to tears.

Sometimes there is no shortcut to learning.

Much of AI is being marketed to us and students as a shortcut. The easy way to complete a task, assignment, paper, or degree. In AI’s Promise To Pay Attention For You., Marc Watkins of Mississippi AI Institute, says, “Many third-party app developers are building off of OpenAI’s API to create apps that promise an end-to-end user experience where a machine listens for you, complies with information, and then creates bespoke summaries all so you don’t feel burdened by listening or thinking about the content.”

TikTok is full of student videos promoting these apps as the easy way to an easy grade. I’m all for removing friction to make banking, car buying, and hotel booking easy. But is easy the best way to learn? What if friction and struggle are how we learn? In an op-ed Jane Rosenzweig of Harvard College Writing Center says, “Our students are not products to be moved down a frictionless assembly line, and the hard work of reading, writing, and thinking is not a problem to be solved.”

If not used properly AI can get in the way of learning. This summer I received an email marketing assignment in which a student “wrote” bland generic email copy. Then a paragraph explained how the email “fosters a deep emotional connection with the audience” and “reflects a deep understanding of the target audience’s needs.” But it didn’t! It sounded like the correct but unfeeling, general copy LLMs tend to generate.

The LLM knew what good email copy should do, but couldn’t write it. My student needed to be the human in the loop. I can teach how to write copy that forms an emotional connection with the audience based on human insight, but not if a student uses AI to write the entire assignment. Why would an employer hire them if AI could complete the entire project on its own?

Is liberal arts education the answer to AI job losses?

If AI takes away skills, many say the way to remain relevant is through liberal arts. Business Insider says AI startup founders hire liberal arts grads to get an edge. In Bloomberg, a Goldman Tech Guru says AI is spurring a “Revenge of the Liberal Arts.” WIRED proclaims, “To Own the Future, Read Shakespeare.”

IBM’s AI chief advises students who want a tech job to learn the language and creative thinking skills you get in the liberal arts. Because AI speaks our language not computer code we need prompt engineers “to train it up in human behavior and thinking.”

Marketing AI Institute’s Paul Roetzer believes the next generation entering the workforce will remain relevant with a broad-based liberal arts education. Literature, philosophy, history, and art are what make us human and teach critical thinking, analysis, creativity, communication, collaboration, integrity, understanding, and nuance. What AI can’t do.

But what if AI can also get in the way of learning liberal arts? Using AI to skip the reading and skip the writing skips the learning to save time for what? Doing the reading, processing the information, committing it to memory, and explaining it through writing is how you learn critical thinking and creativity. To have an imagination you need knowledge.

Is AI the answer to our loneliness epidemic?

In 2023, the Surgeon General released an advisory warning of a crisis of loneliness, isolation, and lack of connection. Nearly half in the U.S. experience loneliness which can increase the risk of death comparable to smoking. Rates of anxiety and depression on college campuses have never been higher. More than 60% of college students report at least one mental health problem.

Some are promising AI can solve this problem with Artificial intelligence friends. I sat in a room full of people with an author talking about human connection while students in front of me focused on their screens. Are AI friends really the best solution? What I often see in the classroom is students not talking to each other because they are focused on their screens.

After Ross finished there was a Q&A. A mental health professional behind me wanted to thank him. She gives her patients struggling with anxiety and depression Ross’s books as homework. Many report back that the books make the difference in being able to get out of bed some days.

I did not miss the irony. Many students struggle with anxiety and depression and many feel screen time is a part of it. Yet, here I was between a mental health professional, students, and one of her solutions. A real human in the room. I’m sad for the students who missed out on the joy of the evening – right past the screens taking their attention. In reading Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation my understanding and empathy for Gen Z has grown.

The exception rather than the rule.

It’s important to note this was a couple students. I’m grateful for the larger group of enthusiastically engaged students at the event. In my experience, most students are not looking for the easy way out and want to learn their disciplines by integrating AI in beneficial ways. But they need our guidance.

In a review by Turnitin, they found that of the more than 200 million writing assignments reviewed by Turnitin’s AI detection tool last year, some AI use was detected in just 1 out of 10 assignments. Only 3 out of every 100 were generated mostly by AI.

Education experts warn that focusing too much on AI cheating can cause distrust between instructors and students. We should frame the conversation around ways AI can both support and detract from learning. Our role is AI literacy, providing specific guidance on when and when not to use AI.

I hope to educate students on the role of AI in their lives and how to make intentional choices about what to outsource to AI, what to keep for ourselves, and how to prepare for careers with AI to keep humans in the loop.

For a look at my next blog article on AI see “AI Turned My Academic Journal Article Into An Engaging Podcast For Social Media Pros In Minutes.”

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