Hi Reader
Nearly two decades ago, 19-year-old Harvard student Kaavya Viswanathan achieved the kind of success most aspiring writers only dream about. She landed a high-profile, six-figure book deal for her first novel, How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life. Movie rights were already in the works.
Then everything unraveled.
The Harvard Crimson published side-by-side comparisons showing passages strikingly similar to work by author Megan McCafferty. Viswanathan said she had read McCafferty’s books so many times that she had “internalized” some of the language. Then similarities to other authors surfaced.
Her publisher pulled the book. The movie deal disappeared.
This was 2006. Long before generative AI was writing novels. ChatGPT didn’t exist. The internet itself was still new enough that some people were still debating what terrible things it might unleash.
Meanwhile, humans had already figured out how to copy each other.
AI Didn't Invent Unoriginal Thinking
Today, we’re having a remarkably similar conversation about AI.
AI writing is generic. AI copies. AI makes it easier to plagiarize. AI is flooding the internet with garbage. There’s truth in all of that.
AI absolutely makes it easier to produce enormous amounts of content without contributing much original thought. But AI didn’t invent that problem.
What AI did was make it dramatically easier to produce huge volumes of polished, middle-of-the-road content. So if we already know this to be true, why are so many people still letting AI flatten the very things that make their work worth reading?
Why aren’t we adding more of our perspective? Our experiences? Our stories? Our voice?
For the past few years, much of the AI conversation has been built around one promise: save time. Write faster. Create faster. Produce more. And everyone jumped on the bandwagon. But somewhere along the way, “faster” started getting confused with “better.”
This is where I think a lot of people are using AI backwards.
We’re allowing AI to create a voice for us when we should be using it to amplify the voice we already have.
That’s what I’m digging into in this week’s article: Your Voice Is Power.
I look at why your point of view becomes more valuable as AI makes it easier for everyone to sound like an expert—and I share some practical ways to use AI without letting it strip away the very things that make people want to hear from you.
Read: Your Voice Is Power →
Monica
PS: Practical AI for Business Leaders starts Tuesday. If you’ve been meaning to join us, this is your last weekend to grab a seat.
