AI and my voice

If you use AI like a vending machine, give it no context, and expect a publishable essay in one shot, you’ll get clichés and fluff. If you use it as a partner in the loop—brainstorming, outlining, drafting, revising—it reflects your patterns back to you and makes them sharper.

I take the patterns and principles I agree with—signature moves I want to enhance, foibles I want to avoid—and add them to my personal “style guide”: a Google Doc full of guidelines and examples that train the model on how to think like me. Plugged into the project files of a ChatGPT or Claude project, it functions as a “writing brain” that brings... See more

Every time I publish a new essay, I go through the same ritual.

I download a Word document of the final draft and upload it to the project I have set up for my Every column Working Overtime in ChatGPT. Once it's there, I prompt it with one of my favorite AI incantations: What do you notice?