How I learned to stop letting AI write for me.
I let a computer speak for me because I didn’t think I had a voice of my own. As the same writing started showing up everywhere, so did voices telling me I was wrong for using it at all.
Buh bye self-confidence!
If you haven’t already read it, you may want to start here…
Part two of three
During those first weeks of posting my essays, I started to notice a pattern on Substack notes.
Writers who expressed their displeasure with AI, clearly afraid that it was ruining the profession. Some were using pretty harsh and negative language towards anyone who uses it.
They weren’t entirely wrong.
They wrote about AI stripping down all of the things that make you sound like you. They said it removes all of the uniqueness about your voice.
But what if you never had a voice? What if you have ADHD and your voice doesn’t translate to anything readable?
The only voice I knew was the one in my head which never focuses on one thing for very long.
The stories I tell out loud start somewhere random and I jump around. As I recall more detail I have to verbalize it immediately, or it’s gone within seconds. Back and forth. Never a beginning middle and end in the right order.
Then there’s the disfluencies. I hate them.
I didn’t even know what they were before my ADHD diagnosis. They’re all of the extra annoying bits I add in because my brain is moving at a different pace than my mouth.
Um, uh, like yeah, you know. The stutters. And my favorite which is repeating words or phrases two or three times for no good reason. The more excited I get, the worse it comes out.
I became unhappy, ashamed and embarrassed.
Talented and experienced writers on Substack were condemning others for using AI.
I had somehow made my way here thinking it was going to be a safer place than the angry ramblings that caused me to deactivate my Facebook profile for a year.
Seemingly open and intelligent people were making others feel like they don’t belong. No thought to how it might impact them. No sensitivity, no understanding. All or nothing attitudes.
I was distraught.
It reminded me that I wasn’t smart enough or talented enough to be here. There was no place for me and my stories.
I felt paralyzed and depressed. Anything I tried to write with or without the help of AI was trash. Unreadable.
When I was done feeling sorry for myself (because that’s how it always starts) I started to wonder how many other people felt the way I did.
People who were neurodivergent, or dyslexic, or simply lacked the education or confidence to share their ideas, stories, or opinions.
How much has the world lost because someone was told their voice didn’t matter unless they knew how to talk or write a certain way?
I remember thinking “Fuck you man!”
Were my stories and experiences supposed to stay locked up inside and go with me to my grave? Now that I finally found a way to get them out of my head?
Just as I finally stopped giving a shit about their opinions.
I had an even more disturbing discovery. I started seeing my exact same writing showing up everywhere.
It’s sort of like when you buy a new car and you start noticing every other car like yours on the road, when you hadn’t really given it a second thought before you bought it.
My writing wasn’t unique to me at all. And now I was learning what AI was doing and I was becoming really good at spotting it.
I started a banned list. All the things AI wasn’t allowed to say when it was helping with my writing.
I spent months fighting with ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude. No matter what I did, the AI couldn’t help itself. It changed the grammar, added fillers and dramatized my stories in a way I never would.
How many prompts and elaborate project instructions I wrote! Pages of what to do and what not to do.
Countless hours thinking I was eventually going to train it, so I could simply say few words and it would know exactly what to do.
It took me three or four days to write a single essay.
And just when I thought I had it just right, another obstacle entered the scene.
My husband.
—R. Michael
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In case you missed the first part…
I always like what you write. There are a lot of substack writers and others that I've stopped reading; not because I don't like what they write, but because I could spend all day reading their words and not writing my own. But your words are so uniquely you, (or so I believe), that I want to read every word you write, whether AI or not. You have quite a gift, and I thank you for sharing it.