Eight Tips for Writing With AI Without Giving Up Your Voice
Let me take you back to when I was a teenager. My next door neighbour used to pay me twenty dollars at the end of each week. What for, you ask? For walking over, getting her two kids dressed, feeding them breakfast, and walking them to school. That was her way of avoiding the morning chaos, and I was more than happy to help. For me it was easy money. Their school was already on my way to mine.
Her kids were close to my age, and one of them, a boy I secretly admired for his stubborn spirit, had a favourite line. Whenever I told him to get ready or finish his cereal, he would look me dead in the eye and say, “I can do what I want. You are not the boss of me.” I bring this up because the title of this piece is a quiet little nod to him. I imagine he is grown now, hopefully still challenging anyone who tries to push him around.
But this is not an essay about him. It is about us and our new relationship with artificial intelligence, more specifically generative writing tools like ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini. Somewhere along the way, many of us began letting these systems think for us, speak for us, and in some cases, even feel for us. Read enough online writing today and you start to notice a pattern. A sameness. A soft, even tone, the literary equivalent of eating oatmeal every day. Warm. Safe. Routine. Completely forgettable. Even the fake stories AI generates feel the same. Yes, AI generates fake anecdotes.
I am not here to scold anyone for using artificial intelligence. I use it too. I love it. It is brilliant. But here is the thing I want to say. It is very easy to let artificial intelligence become the boss of your writing. It can produce paragraphs in seconds, and sometimes those paragraphs are tempting to accept as they are. But the whole point of writing is to sound like yourself. Not like a well behaved machine.
And yes, I can admit without a flicker of shame that I absolutely pretend my Substack is a real magazine, just so I can indulge my childhood fantasies and proudly pat myself on the back for writing an essay that only three loyal subscribers will ever see. It is a playful and quirky little whim I happily indulge. But I will also be the first to admit that I am a hobby writer who actually enjoys the old fashioned toil of using my own brain and creativity to string together my own do it yourself sentences and slowly shape them into a full article. Half the fun is in the work itself. I heard someone recently say, “I want AI to do my laundry and dishes so that I can do art and writing, not for AI to do my art and writing so that I can do my laundry and dishes.” I felt that deeply. I love the creativity and joy of building whimsical, self made sentences that grow into a full, imperfect, hard earned piece of writing.
More of us need to stop trying to sound like Important Writers (that tone is better saved for polished work reports and LinkedIn articles).The world already has enough stiff, serious prose. We need more personality. More surprise. More of the odd little jokes and confessions that make us human. Writing should not polish the life out of you. Life is messy. Life interrupts itself. Life spills a little coffee on the page sometimes.
So let your writing do the same. Break a rule if you feel like it. Begin a sentence with and. Say something a little strange. Do not worry about being perfectly literate. Worry instead about being alive on the page.
In the end, your voice is what sets you apart, not the polished, neutral tone of artificial intelligence. While I fully endorse the use of AI, it is genuinely helpful, the key is how you use it. Partner with AI, but do not hand over the steering wheel. Let it ride in the passenger seat. You decide where the story goes. With that in mind, here are my starter tips for writing with tools like ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini. First, it helps to understand prompt engineering.
Prompt engineering is the art and science of crafting clear, thoughtful instructions that guide AI toward useful and accurate responses. Rather than asking a single, vague question, effective prompting provides a roadmap, offering context, a role or perspective, examples, and clear boundaries. It is also an iterative process, you refine your prompts based on what the AI returns, much like revising a draft. When you approach AI this way, you are not outsourcing your thinking, you are shaping it. Prompt engineering allows you to steer the tool’s broad capabilities toward your specific goals, while keeping your voice, values, and lived experience at the center of the work. With that said, here are my Eight Tips for Writing With AI Without Giving Up Your Voice:
- Be specific. Tell ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini exactly what you need, and provide enough context for it to respond well.
- Give it a role. Ask it to act as an editor, a brainstorm partner, or a critical reader.
- Work in steps. Request help with one part at a time, rather than everything at once.
- Set examples and boundaries. Specify the tone you want, and clearly state what to avoid.
- Use it as support, not a substitute. Ask for ideas, feedback, or alternatives, not your final voice.
- Include your own stories and anecdotes. Do not let AI invent them. Your experiences should remain distinctly yours.
- Review the tone. Step away, then read your work aloud, to ensure it still sounds like you.
- Check for errors. AI can make mistakes, so confirm spelling, usage, and conventions, such as Canadian versus American spelling.
So by all means, invite AI into your process. Just do not let it drive. Your voice, messy, opinionated, and unmistakably human, belongs in the driver’s seat. Let your pages breathe. Let them be imperfect, chaotic, and unmistakably yours.
The Middle Slice 