Finding My Writing Voice In The AI Age
AI is great for exploring thoughts, and I've used it heavily to help me write some of the notes in my digital garden. One thing I've found however is that it results in me losing my "voice": my distinct writing style. While my writing style is remarkably similar to that of a lot of AI models (probably because I'm really analytical and formulaic?), it's not identical.
In order to keep my writing style my own, I think I need to write enough 100% original content unaided, and never dump raw AI output into my notes. When using an AI to help me write some of my notes, I can have it learn from my tone from these notes to get me closer. It's better to use AI to help clarify the ideas, or to criticize my writing to come up with points for improvement, and then manually write my own changes.
The danger of losing my voice is real, and I imagine something all of us are dealing with right now, and we need to fight back against the temptation of using the AI chatbots to do our thinking for us.
In order to accomplish this in my Obsidian Zettelkasten, I'm going to use a tag: GeneratedWithAI. This will help me keep track of any former notes that were mostly AI generated. I can then either rewrite these, or at least tell the LLM to exclude those from sampling for my own voice. Eventually I may make a file similar to an AGENTS.md type of file documenting my particular quirks and vocabulary choices that can be gathered from my writings.