Your authentic voice as an author versus generating a writing voice for yourself through AI programmes.

Do you have a favourite author? What is it about the author’s style that appeals to you? Is it their ability to effortlessly build characters and develop a storyline, creating an authentic story that you feel part of? Is it their way of expounding truths in a simple way that is easy to grasp?

There is something about an author’s authentic voice (author-enticity – my own word) that draws you to read their books and look forward to their next book with great anticipation.  Over time, you recognise the style that makes them your favourite writer. In simple terms, it is the author’s voice speaking directly to their audience, the readers.

Think of Francine Rivers and her ability to draw you into the character development and intricate plot of her stories, making you wish there was a sequel if it is a stand-alone book, or look forward to her next novel (which takes two to three years to publish).

So many people have a burning desire to write their personal story, a fictional story, or a devotional or teaching (non-fiction) book, or even just share their research or interests with others. However, so many want to fast-track the process and skip some of the important details and steps along the way.

AI has entered the marketplace in full force and has changed how we view things, complete tasks, and present them.

The issue with an author’s authenticity is that many people use AI as a ghostwriter for their content.

Definition of a ghostwriter

A ghostwriter is a writer who writes content for someone else, using that person’s ideas, experiences, and voice, while the other person is credited as the author.

The ‘Memory versus Math’ Concept in AI writing

How does AI fail authors, particularly those writing fiction? There is something called the ‘Memory versus Math’ Concept:

AI doesn’t have a childhood; it doesn’t have senses, and it has never broken a bone or a heart. When it makes a metaphor, it’s just doing math on what other writers have written. But fiction, whether a novel, a memoir or a testimony, needs your specific sensory memories. If a room smelled like stale coffee and old linoleum, that is a thousand times more powerful to a reader than an AI telling us it was a ‘chamber of profound sorrow’.

According to Sam Woolfe from Writer’s for Hire:

‘Using AI is like using a cheap, fast, but robotic ghostwriter that needs a lot of human fixing.’

‘Machines lack true creativity and need heavy editing.’

‘AI should only be a small tool, not a real replacement for a human writer.’

The differences between a human ghostwriter and AI:

• Human Voice: A human ghostwriter learns how you talk and feel. AI often sounds generic and robotic.
• Emotions: A human adds real-life experience and deep meaning. AI just guesses the next likely word.
• Cost and Time: A human costs a lot of money and takes months. AI costs very little and takes seconds.

Let’s look at two favourite AI tools that people use for writing today:

1.    ChatGPT (Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer).

A breakdown of ChatGPT:

• Chat: the interface lets you talk to the AI like you are texting a friend.
• Generative: the AI creates brand new, original text instead of just copying old data.
• Pre-trained: the AI learned from a massive amount of internet text, books, and articles before talking to users.
• Transformer: the special computer design helps the AI understand how words relate to each other in a sentence

2.    Grammarly

Yes, Grammarly is an AI tool. It began as a simple spell-checker in 2009 but has since grown into an advanced AI writing assistant.

Grammarly uses AI for:

• Basic Proofreading, using machine learning and natural language processing to spot grammar, spelling, and punctuation mistakes.
• Style and Tone, by analysing your sentences to suggest ways to improve clarity, adjust your tone, or make your writing more engaging.
• Generative AI with features such as its generative rewrites and AI prompts that can create text, brainstorm ideas, or completely rewrite paragraphs for you.

Will Grammarly trigger AI detectors?

When an author uses its basic features to correct spelling and grammar, it does not generally trigger AI content detectors. However, when you use the generative features to write or heavily rephrase entire sections, it can be flagged by AI detectors.

The effect of heavy reliance on AI

Heavy reliance on AI can flatten your authentic voice, and make your writing sound more formal, bland, and homogenised (like everybody else’s voice). This means that you lose your unique voice as an author. You lose your personal quirks, eccentricities, ‘pet words’, and natural conversational rhythm to average patterns from data sets.

AI also relies on cliché transition words such as ‘moreover’. Heavily contrasted sentences e.g. ‘not … but …’ and the famous em dash.

Yes, it removes human imperfection, but polished machine text often lacks the emotional depth, lived experience, and stylistic risks that make an author’s voice recognisable.

How to use AI without losing your Authentic Voice

In her article on ‘How to co-author with AI without losing your authentic voice’, Dr Melissa A. Wheeler says: ‘Considering AI’s prominence in emails, podcasts, reports, and other content, it seems that we may have an authenticity crisis on our hands. Detecting individual voices in this tidal wave of AI content is getting harder. Effectively sharing your authentic voice is a skill worth honing.’

Her tips for writing with your authentic voice are:

• Don’t let AI serve as your ghostwriter.
• Stand out from the crowd.
• Shape your own story.

Strategies to Protect Your Authentic Voice

1. Write first, edit second: Before you feed your manuscript to AI, draft your core ideas and narrative intent manually. The first key to writing well is just to write – ignore the spelling, punctuation, and grammar errors and write to get your flow of thought on paper. Whether you write or type, just go with the natural flow of your thought process.
2. Treat AI as an assistant, not your co-writer: Use AI for low-stakes tasks like checking clarity but avoid letting it generate original concepts or ghostwrite creative sections.
3. Perform a reverse edit: After using AI to refine a paragraph, manually inject your natural pauses, personal anecdotes, and conversational phrasing back into the text. (Yes, it means that you will be editing your editing tool’s changes.)

Think carefully about how you use AI in your writing and decide when you are comfortable using AI-generated content.

Ask yourself:

Did AI do significant creative or thinking work in my writing process?

Is my authorship or originality being evaluated?

Could not disclosing my use of AI mislead the reader?

If the answer to any of these is ‘YES’, consider whether you should disclose your use of AI.

Note: Publishers ask you to be transparent about your use of AI because it helps them serve you in the best way possible. And yes, AI makes mistakes and may not convey it in the way that would authentically reflect your language and tone.

Use AI-generated content thoughtfully, especially when you are expected to produce your own work. It is more appropriate to use AI as an editing or support tool for your own writing than to have it create the content for you.