My wife is a professional book editor and is looking sadder every day, because a mounting percentage of the jobs being submitted to her say this, “My book is my voice, I just ran it through AI for grammar.”

“What they don’t know,” she tells me privately “is that every one of these books sound exactly the same, even across varying subjects. They don’t know what AI is doing to the voice they think they have.”

If you read a lot of work on Substack you can see it creeping in everywhere. Authors I’ve been subscribed to for years are making the decision to “get a little help” from AI, polish things up a bit, speed up the process, and you can see it and feel it. The tells are subtle until they’re not. And then you just get sad about what is happening.

In the individual case of each writer, I’m sure it feels like an improvement. En masse it is the enshittification of communication.

Every time any author gives up a corner of their authentic voice to the help of AI, it’s like losing another species of insect or amphibian in the rainforest. A tragedy no one is tracking or shrugs away as just part of life in the modern world.

Even if the AI help has sharpened the point being made, it’s not why I read. I’m reading because it’s you, and watching you fight for hard-earned clarity and a voice that is truly yours and get there over time is the thrill of this whole communication game.

And, now adding an extension of this note a few days later which came up in a comment below . . .

I am so frequently surprised by what comes out when I make the effort to articulate something that seems simple, or mundane, especially in a conversational setting where there is an actual person asking or listening to my thoughts and ideas. And then I think, wow, I never would have stumbled on this idea, or way of thinking about it, or expressing it, had I dialed in the communication with some form of autopilot reply, responding or writing without attention, or completely outsourcing the communication to another person, or in this case, a machine.

Organic human thought and expression is the equivalent to me of how tropical rain forests are called the lungs of the world. Bulldoze the rain forests and a few decades later we’re like, oh wait, those were really really important.

Similarly, human language/expression/communication is the rain forest of our inner world it seems to me. Or even more precisely, language formation, the actual activity of thinking in language has an atmospheric benefit to us as a species.

To think with rigor and skill, and express ourselves with authenticity and joy, and the electric excitement of discovery—discovery of ideas, discovery of the other, discovery of ourselves—has an unseen beneficial impact on our neural networks, which are shared more than we know. (Or so I think, without the science or research to point to.) I feel sure one day we will have those measurements.

Even to be stumped with what to say, or how to say it, and to let the question of appropriate or skillful expression work on us, and work in us, while we wait for something real and true to arise—that’s an important part of the health of our psychic fabric I believe.

Every time we outsource communication, as though we’ve got something more important to do, we lose the opportunity to see that just this, right here, right now, in the most mundane or small or ordinary moments, something delightful or profound or compelling could emerge.

So . . . yes, I’m a vote for all in our own words. Hints, and truths, and clues, and pieces of the soul dance betwixt and between those very words, no matter how low priority or ordinary we think they may be.