When our voice is no longer our own
I strive not to traffic in conspiracy theories.
And yet …
I worry about the threats that technology, authoritarianism, and out-of-control productivity culture pose to our humanity.
For me, it all comes back to how we use our voice. Not our vocal instruments – rather, the words we use and the choices we make in using them.
I’m careful about the language I use.
As a closeted young adult in the 1980s, I watched how people used, or did not use, gendered terms for the significant others in their lives.
Many conversations were simultaneous games of strategy:
- What to say.
- What to leave alone.
- How to be vague.
- When, if ever, a “white lie” was appropriate.
It could hardly be surprising then that, in journalism school and the three newsrooms where I worked, I spent most of my time helping others strengthen their voices.
Grammar, vocabulary, tone, precision, accuracy – each became a focal point of my work. Each had a part to play in honing a writer’s unique voice.
If I did my job right, they didn’t notice when the words they read beneath their byline were words they didn’t write.
Sometimes, I failed.
I remember a reporter once coming to me, livid after reading his story in that day’s edition. “That doesn’t even sound like me,” he said, exasperated.
I tried to explain:
I needed to trim the story to fit the space and tried to do so unobtrusively. After a bit, I agreed that if time allotted, I would give him a heads-up and a chance to do it himself. He, in turn, acknowledged I might have to do the best I could on deadline, and if I could remember a brief FYI note, he’d appreciate it.
He passed away a few years ago, after a long career at several newspapers.
But a few weeks ago, I heard his voice chuckling, when I saw a piece I’d written and said, “That doesn’t even sound like me.”
Earlier this month, I submitted the eighth in my occasional Record Relays series:
Through an accident, the publication spellcheck program essentially rewrote the article.
I wish I’d had the presence of mind to screen-shot or print out this version. Alas, the only two things I can recall:
- I called a song a “bop.” Unless it’s the Cyndi Lauper No. 3 hit, that’s a highly unlikely turn of phrase for me.
- When describing Stevie Wonder’s appearance in the bridge of Jermaine Jackson’s “Let’s Get Serious:”
“I” said: “Thank God !” complete with exclamation point. That irritated me because it gave the fact a snarky undertone that wasn’t mine. (I called it a “powerful bridge,” but I like Jermaine’s performance and don’t feel it needed saving by Wonder.)
And I don’t casually use that exclamation.
Maybe remembering my long-ago interaction with the reporter, I sent our publisher a note asking for a heads-up the next time a piece needed that much of a rewrite. His quick response and swift reversion assured me it was an utter accident.
Nevertheless, the experience encouraged me to think more about how technology, unchecked, can damage our voices.
On social media, memes, quotations and even entire posts attributed to notables turn out to be fake.
Such fast-and-loose publication warps our communal understanding of truth.
Now as a school counselor – one with hearing loss, at that – I find myself the more finely attuned to voice.
What someone is choosing to say and why. What is left unsaid. How the way they communicate reflects the people they are or want to be.
I worry about the rise of artificial intelligence and its potential to devalue the processes of writing, editing and human communication.
This spring I spoke with a senior in danger of not graduating. A teacher had determined that major assignments used AI. I explained that the teacher wasn’t insisting that the work be exemplary, but that it needed to be the student’s.
I can understand students’ confusion.
After all, are teachers using online tools to confirm student AI use?
Regardless, I agree that an essential element of an educated society is the ability to use your own voice and make your own arguments, not have them made for you.
That’s why I resist AI that purportedly would make professional life easier.
- A spam email promises AI will provide perfect recommendation letters for my seniors?
- An ad in a counseling magazine says AI can generate session notes from a therapist’s observations?
No. Absolutely not.
Ethics issues aside – could the company that created the software somehow access session notes? – my letters, my notes are my work. I would want anyone to know that they’re the results of my personal reflection and assessment – not some algorithm.
At their best, writing and editing are more than mere recitation of fact or expression of opinion.
They’re invitations from the author to the audience to open your ears and your heart to our voices. Hear what we’re saying, and respond to us in kind.
AI may get the grammar right. It may even evolve to the point where it nails the precision, accuracy, vocabulary and tone.
But it will never have the heart that powers the human voice.
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Interesting stuff. I’m not an optimist about everything but I’m hopeful there will always be space for and a need for the human element in writing and storytelling. I’d say I’m curious rather than fearful as to how AI will impact.
I contribute to tnocs because I enjoy the process of writing. Sometimes things progress in a linear fashion; idea, research, write it up. Sometimes its far more haphazard, start off with one intention and end up in a completely different place. Those ones might be even more fun. I like how the distraction shapes it, finding a single sentence or fact and deciding that’s where the story lies. I’m sure AI will continue to improve and would be quicker and simpler but whether it can replicate the myriad human experiences, points of view and idiosyncrasies of the different journeys and choice of words people take to get to the finished product I dont know. If AI keeps building on what has gone before will it eventually devour itself and lead to a smoothing out of the rough edges?
As long as there are people that get joy from the creative process, producing or consuming, I think we’ll be OK.
For those that might be interested, let me expound a little bit on what Chuck was referring to.
Keeping things cranking around here is a complete labor of love. But it takes a lot of time. And over my career in the real world, I’ve learned that when you can automate a process or streamline it at the very least, it’s additive to the entire project . That’s why since the first month or so of this operation, I’ve used things like pagination tools and other such devices to keep things rolling so that I am able to publish at our 5 to 6 days a week rate.
One of the things that I’ve done forever is to deploy an automated spellchecker. I had even trained it to lovingly accept British and Australian spellings, to keep the flavor of our beloved writers that reside outside the United States.
In this day of AI, lots of software providers are deciding to upgrade their products by, instead of classic algorithmic methods, deploying AI to get the job done. The spellcheck application did this recently. New and improved, I suppose.
But what it also did was default to proactively “punch up and rewrite“ the text. In other words, instead of just checking for spelling errors, it took Chuck’s article and completely revamped it.
Now, you’re probably thinking, that’s anywhere from tragic to hilarious, but why did it end up seeing the light of day? There’s where pilot error enters. I’d become so reliant on the software doing its usual thing that I didn’t go back and triple check. So that’s on me.
I was horrified, but Chuck was amazingly gracious about it, and the important thing is that I wanted to let you all know what was going on.
Said program has been retired and I have gone back to good old MS Outlook and word to get the job done.
Likely more than anybody cared to know about the whole sordid affair, but just wanted to be transparent. Carry-on.
Funny how upgrades are sometimes downgrades. Being horrified shows you care, which we all knew already.
I use ChatGPT for my articles, but to research them, not to write them. In the one I’m working on at the moment, I wanted to know when a particular obscure song was released. In the olden days — say, two years ago — I would have Googled the song and gone from website to website hoping to find the date. ChatGPT was able to do all that work for me in a matter of seconds.
Writers need to have their own individual voices. That’s what makes reading them fun. Each of our regular writers here “sound” nothing alike. In fact, I bet mt58 could come up with a quiz where he lists sentences from submissions that haven’t been published yet, and we have to guess who wrote them.
Like he doesn’t have enough to do around here.
Anyway, good stuff as always, Chuck. Let’s keep keeping it real.
I bet mt58 could come up with a quiz where he lists sentences from submissions that haven’t been published yet, and we have to guess who wrote them.
Hmm…
May need to un-Brit/Aussie the spelling or two of them will be even more obvious!
Greetings, tnocs comments section. I hope this response finds you well.
The Stereogum and tnocs experiences over the last 5 years or more have made me realize that I actually appreciate writing. I like it when I can go back and read something that I’ve read and I actually like it. I don’t think that I’m a gooder writer than anyone else here, but I’m glad I can hold my own. It’s a fun thing to do. AI is helpful with ideas and research, but at this point, I can’t imagine it doing my writing for me.
I also am cautiously optimistic about AI. It will change things for sure, but hopefully it doesn’t end the world.
Dave?
It might.
Nooooo. I’m supposed to be the apocalyptic one. To improve my mental health, I stopped reading every, literally every damn book about the Supreme Court available at the public library and for sale at Barnes and Noble. I know some constitutional law. And that’s not a flex. People should feel sorry for me. That’s not a way to live life.
Masha Gessen cracks me up. After scaring the crap out of you for her allotted ten minutes, she tells people: “But don’t stop believing things will get better.”
A priest recently asked me and some other musicians to help him film a video of a song he had written. The recording we were to “fake play” along with was generated entirely by AI, the singing, instruments, everything. It sounded amazing and very human and it left me as a musician feeling terrified, not going to lie. AI is a reality, but I will probably be one the last people to fight against it and not want to use it by the time they drag me out of here kicking and screaming.
MIT did some research on the impact of AI usage on brain activity and the results were concerning. Another reason to keep using our own voice. MIT conclusion: While LLMs offer immediate convenience, our findings highlight potential cognitive costs. Over four months, LLM users consistently underperformed at neural, linguistic, and behavioral levels.
After only four months? Wow.
I haven’t read that study. That sounds fascinating. It also sounds entirely predictable.
Lately, on just about a weekly basis, I’ll get a email from someone that I’ve corresponded with for years, and say to myself, “what’s going on there? Doesn’t sound like Eddie.”
It’s a complicated issue. Over the past 40 years, many technological advances have been described as “the beginning of the end” but it turned out perfectly fine.On my most optimistic days, that’s what I’m thinking is going on with AI. When all the dust settles, it’ll be for the greater good.
And on my darkest days, I fear for the youth.
I recently read about the “GenZ stare.” Not encouraging.
You can change last 40 years for 4,000 years. Probably even longer. Socrates is said to have been critical of the written word as it would be detrimental to the memory. While in the 18th century there was moral panic over the effects of reading on those not deemed up to the rigour of such of a task. Or reading the wrong sort of literature. A headline from 1797 read ‘Novel Reading: A Cause of Fenale Depravity’.
A lesson that what we consider tame and everyday now was subjected to the same doubts and fears that we see with AI.
My takeaway is, it’ll probably work out fine. Give it another 100 years and the AI debate will seem quaint to subsequent generations.
Did AI help with the research?
If it did, MIT didn’t tell us that.
Thanks, all of you, for your thoughtful feedback as always. And thanks to mt for allowing me to develop a piece capturing my thoughts from the experience earlier this month. He didn’t have to, and it says volumes about him that he not only approved the idea but gave further explanation in the comments. Atta publisher.
❤
I like Occam’s Razor better than conspiracy theories.