How to use AI without losing your voice

These tools learn from millions of examples and hand back the most likely answer. The most likely answer sits in the middle, and the middle has nobody's face.

No tool fixes this, because it is what they are built to do. Knowing it changes how you use them.

Around the work rather than in it. Answering the same email for the tenth time, sorting files, transcribing an interview, subtitling a video, turning loose notes into a first draft.

None of that is your work. It is what eats the hours you would rather spend on it, and that is where the machine earns its keep.

Feed it your own material before you ask for anything. Three or four texts you wrote, the words you always use and the ones you never would.

Ask for drafts, never final versions. Read them, cut what you would not say and rewrite every line that sounds like an advert.

One test works well. If a sentence could sit on anyone's website, it is not yours, so it goes.

Same rule. Let AI handle what comes before and after the picture, and keep the decision that makes it yours.

References, colour tests, cleaning a background, widening a frame. All of that helps. What you shoot, what you paint and what you leave out is still what people recognise as you.

When AI made a part that people will judge as your own, yes. A generated image shown as a photograph is the plain case.

When it helped with an email or a caption, nothing changes for the reader. Ask whether someone would feel misled if they found out. If they would, say so.

If you want to think this through for your own work, write to us.