Write It Yourself and Low-Key Save Our Species

by Tim Leogrande, BSIT, MSCP, Ed.S.

🗓 MAY 14 2026 • 3 MIN 30 SEC READ

I was recently having coffee with a book editor friend who shared that, as more writers turn to AI for assistance, he keeps hearing different versions of the same refrain,

"My book was entirely written by me, but I ran it through AI to polish it up before submission."

Palpably exasperated, he added "What they don't realize is that all of these books now sound pretty much the same, even across different genres. Writers have no clue about how often AI is drowning out their own voices.”

You can witness this phenomenon permeating almost everything if you routinely read social media posts, blogs, and — increasingly — popular online news outlets. Authors who I have been following for years are now choosing to “get a little help” from AI to “tighten things up a bit” and “streamline the process.” The telltale signs are subtle, until they become obvious.

The more writers who do this, the more disappointed I become about our current trajectory. Each time a writer relinquishes a portion of their own voice to AI, it feels a bit like losing another colorful species of tropical bird to extinction. Yet this tragedy is commonly either ignored or dismissed as an inevitable fact of life in the digital age.

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I don't read just to be informed or entertained. Even if AI writing assistance can make your topic more interesting, or your story more compelling, I'm almost always reading because it is you who is doing the writing. And part of the fun of this whole communication thing is watching each other strive to find a clear voice that is authentically our own.

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I’m frequently surprised by what comes out when I attempt to describe something that seems simple or commonplace, especially in a conversational setting where a real person is asking questions or listening to my thoughts and ideas. At these times, I often realize that I would never have come up with a particular idea, way of thinking about it, or way of expressing it if I had short-circuited the exchange with a knee-jerk response, replied without really paying attention, or simply outsourced my part in the discussion to another person or, in this case, a large language model.

I think organic human thought and expression are like tropical rainforests that are, effectively, our planet’s life support system. After a few decades of pillaging and taking them for granted, we realized these ecosystems are crucial to the well-being of life on this planet. In a similar vein, I think human cognition, language, and self-expression are the rainforests of our inner worlds. Or, to put it another way, language formation — that is, the process of actually thinking through language — greatly benefits our species.

Our neural networks, which are likely far more interconnected than we realize, benefit from thinking with rigor and competence, expressing ourselves with sincerity and authenticity, and experiencing the rush of discovery — discovery of ideas, discovery of other people, and discovery of ourselves. So it’s important to allow ourselves to be at a loss for words, and let the challenge of engaging in honest and skillful expression light a fire within the depths of our minds. When we do, something genuine, true, and clear can often bubble to the surface.

Although AI can certainly be a useful tool to help with research and fact-checking — or to challenge our ideas and assumptions — when we outsource our actual thinking, writing, or editing to these platforms, we miss out on the opportunity to discover that something beautiful, insightful, or original can arise from the most ordinary and uncomfortable moments.