Your voice or the robot?

"Hey ChatGPT, write me a blog about how important it is to have your own authentic voice rather than using AI". Copy, paste, post, done, tea.

Hopefully you can tell that I didn't do that.

It's interesting to see how people are using AI to help them be more productive. Some are understandably allergic to the very idea of AI (interestingly my kids' generation, late teens, seems to be against it). Some people love it so much they don't seem to be able to function without running every decision by ChatGPT.

Back when I first started making websites, it was common to see schools using Comic Sans (a playful font meant to resemble children's writing) to create images or posters, and we'd turn up our snobby design noses and think about how we might have approached the design and how much better we could have done it. Well, come back, Comic Sans posters, all is forgiven. At least they were authentic and truly reflected the imperfect heart of each of those places.

I love AI as a technical assistant, a coder, a validator, but not as a creator. Why? Because it is the sum of the parts on which it was taught. A grand average of created content. Average is fine for writing code (as long as you know what the code is doing) but it's not an authentic voice.

I actually use AI every day, and pay for at least three different tools monthly. But, before you sharpen your pitchfork, none of them are used in the creative space. No creative image generation, no design, no blog posts (which may be why I'm so poor at blogging regularly). I might ask it to show me what a sofa would look like in my living room, but I'd put that in to the utility category.

In discussing this recently, someone much wiser than myself made this observation. Imagine you went to a TED talk. Where would you want the speaker to have sourced their content? Would you be happy if you knew they used AI to write their speech? I know I wouldn't. If I wanted to hear AI talk I'd have asked AI about the issue. You'd want them to have overcome the struggle, gained the experience, climbed the mountain, invented the solution, or made the mistake. To be authentic and true in a world of average is so much more powerful than being the product of an average output.

When it comes to websites, it should look, feel and sound like you on a good day, not like everyone else on an average one.

Personally I'd rather be the person AI refers to than a thing that refers to AI.