by The AI Optimist with Declan Dunn - AI People First
The AI Optimist cuts through the usual AI noise connecting creators and tech to work together instead of fighting. I'm a Creative AI Strategist who helps creators and businesses co-create with AI, turning humble machines into powerful creative partners. As a subscriber, you will immediately receive The Creator's AI Licensing INTEL. . <br/><br/><a href="https://www.theaioptimist.com?utm_medium=podcast">www.theaioptimist.com</a>
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January 30, 2026
<p>I’ve raised hybrid wolves and they’re a lot like AI. Both come from something that used to be wild.</p><p>There’s that first moment at the fence, when people see them. The breath stops. The body tenses.</p><p>Something ancient recognizes what stands on the other side of the fence: wildness that doesn’t negotiate, power existing on its own terms.</p><p>We build strong fences. It makes people feel safe enough to admire the wolves from a comfortable distance, like AI.</p><p>You build the structure, like ChatGPT. You create the illusion of control. But wolves understand fences as a temporary inconvenience, nothing more.</p><p>Right now, we’re fencing human creativity with AI, far more dangerous than fencing wolves.</p><p>We’re eliminating wildness. And we’re doing it in the name of making creativity easier, predictable, and not better.</p><p><strong>The AI Voice Eating Itself</strong></p><p>Picture a canyon where each sound echoes. At first, the echoes add depth, resonance, and layers of meaning.</p><p><strong>And what happens when the only sound entering that canyon is the echo itself? </strong></p><p><strong>When echo feeds echo feeds echo until the original voice vanishes completely?</strong></p><p>That’s where we are with AI and human creativity.</p><p>Systems now learn from AI-generated text that isn’t always done by AI. Content created to feed algorithms teaching new algorithms what “good” looks like.</p><p>Writing engineered for engagement becomes the standard for writing. Where everything sounds like everything else because everything is everything else.</p><p>Maybe just slightly degraded copies, generation after generation.</p><p>Biologists have a term for what happens when wolves breed only in captivity, when the gene pool narrows, when wildness gets engineered out: genetic collapse.</p><p>The animals look like wolves. They might even act like wolves in controlled environments. But that something that made them wolves? It disappears.</p><p>We’re watching creative collapse happen in real time.</p><p>Now the original creative work that gave AI its power—decades of wild, gloriously messy human expression—is being systematically replaced by content designed to please the systems learning from that wildness in the first place.</p><p><strong>Wild Happens When Limits Become Possibilities</strong></p><p>Wildness isn’t nostalgia. It’s not a romantic Luddite rejection of technology or a call to return to typewriters and handwritten manuscripts.</p><p>Wildness happens when people create for other people, without algorithmic approval as the invisible editor standing over their shoulder.</p><p>You find wild in the researcher’s field notes before editing, full of crossed-out thoughts, marginal questions, uncertainty captured in real time.</p><p>The oral history speaking in dialect and pause and emotion, not vectorized into predictable, standardized text. The essay contradicts itself because the writer discovers what they think as they write it. </p><p>Wildness lives in friction.</p><p>Think about everything we’ve smoothed away in the name of being as smart as AI:</p><p>* The inconsistency showing how people think</p><p>* The silence carrying as much meaning as speech</p><p>* The regional twangs capturing cultural rhythms</p><p>* The contradictions reveal understanding</p><p>* The tangents connecting ideas nobody planned to connect</p><p>These aren’t bugs in human communication. The imperfections are what makes creativity perfect. Coincidences connecting.</p><p>They’re what made those decades of scraped internet content valuable for training AI in the first place. The unplanned moments. The authentic voice. The creative choice that didn’t calculate what would perform best.</p><p>And we’re paving all of it. Like the song goes,</p><p>“Don’t it always seem to goThat you don’t know what you’ve got ‘til it’s gone?They paved paradise, put up a parking lot.” Joni Mitchell</p><p><strong>You cannot protect wildness by destroying what lets it survive and thrive.</strong></p><p>Wildness needs space to exist. Not metaphorical space: the money space. Time and the freedom to create without fitting in as the primary driver.</p><p>Content that follows algorithmic systems gets followers. Visibility. Maybe revenue. The creator engineering for engagement metrics gets to keep creating.</p><p>The one who refuses? They just stop being able to afford to create.</p><p>It’s not dramatic. It’s math, just like AI.</p><p>Big Tech companies built their entire foundation on wildness they didn’t pay for. Decades of human expression taken without permission or compensation. Becoming commercial products worth billions.</p><p>Now that there’s a market, we’re seeing the beginning of licensing 6 years too late.</p><p>The writer spending three years on deeply researched work can’t eat licensing fees that come only if it’s a hit. The oral historian documenting a disappearing language can’t wait for AI companies to decide that data is valuable five years from now. The community needs that today.</p><p>If we want wildness to survive, we must pay for the conditions that let it exist, not just the output it produces.</p><p><strong>Five Ways to Protect What We’re Losing</strong></p><p>This isn’t a technical puzzle with a clever solution. It’s a choice about what we value and what we’re willing to fight for.</p><p>* <strong>Seek wildness intentionally.</strong> It doesn’t arrive by accident anymore. Field research, oral histories, raw interviews, handwritten archives, work untouched by technology yet (and there’s a lot of it) require pursuit and protection.</p><p>Yes, it’s expensive. Yes, it’s slow. Not everything worth having scales like some Hyperscaler.</p><p>These are the roots growing products and creation, not the farmer over harvesting a field that will take decades to grow again.</p><p>* <strong>Design for friction, not around it.</strong> Algorithms optimize friction away because it looks like inefficiency. And wildness lives in spaces resisting perfect smoothness.</p><p>Systems learning about inconsistency, silence, and contradiction create room for reality that doesn’t fit the model. Otherwise it’s clone armies of content repeating in endless loops.</p><p>* <strong>Know where content comes from.</strong> Not all sources deserve equal weight. Models need to know whether text was written for humans or for algorithms. Tracking origin, intent, and degree of optimization lets systems value wild inputs appropriately.</p><p>The risk is people gaming the system, engineering fake wildness.</p><p>The response? Verification and transparency. Imperfect and better than pretending all content is the same, comes from the same place. One is copying, the other is inventing.</p><p>* <strong>Curate, don’t just moderate.</strong> Curation is where creators and communities judge about what matters. When we let engagement metrics replace human taste, we pretend algorithms are neutral.</p><p>They’re not. They’re biased toward virality (and in Meta and Google, the core of profitability), which we’ve turned into quality because it’s got big numbers. And everyone loves chasing big numbers, even if many of them are AI bots.</p><p>* <strong>Let systems rest.</strong> What if models periodically stop ingesting new training data? Freezing forces reliance on existing knowledge and reveals where hallucination fills the gaps.</p><p>Only then do you see what wild inputs really do. Systems that know what they don’t know are more valuable than systems that hallucinate with confidence.</p><p><strong>Wolves laugh at fences, so does AI</strong></p><p>I think about my hybrid wolves often. So smart, inventive, and wild.</p><p>Like the human creativity we’re fencing in with AI.</p><p>We optimize and extract value from expression, while undermining what lets authentic expression emerge.</p><p>Admiring what AI can do with human creativity while starving the sources making those skills possible.</p><p>This is entirely human choice.</p><p>We’re deciding what kind of creativity survives. Fund the conditions where wildness thrives. Protect space for creation that doesn’t start with fitting into algorithms before taking the first step.</p><p>Or we can keep building tighter fences, optimized outputs. Until all that’s left is AI listening to its own voice, wondering why everything sounds the same.</p><p>Wildness taught me something those wolves demonstrate every day: you don’t plan to be authentic, you become so from experience that no current AI will ever touch.</p><p>Because life requires more than a probable answer. It requires space, patience, and respect for what you don’t fully control.</p><p>The question isn’t whether we can build better AI to capture and process human creativity.</p><p>The question is whether we’re willing to protect the conditions where wildness survives, even when it’s impossible to scale.</p><p>Even when it howls into the canyon and expects nothing back but silence.</p><p><strong>What are we choosing to protect?</strong></p><p><p>Thanks for reading The AI Optimist! This post is public so feel free to share it.</p></p><p></p> <br/><br/>This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit <a href="https://www.theaioptimist.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1">www.theaioptimist.com</a>
January 9, 2026
<p><strong>What is the Naruto monkey selfie case and why does it matter for AI?</strong></p><p>A monkey takes a selfie. Years later, a federal judge must decide who owns it.</p><p>In the courtroom, <a target="_blank" href="https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/ca9/16-15469/16-15469-2018-04-23.html">the judge asks with a straight face </a>whether Naruto would be required by law to provide written notice to other macaque monkeys before joining a lawsuit. The courtroom laughs.</p><p>Here’s what’s not funny: the initial ruling.</p><p><strong>No human author, no rights. Period.</strong></p><p>Right now, if you’re creating with AI, the<a target="_blank" href="https://www.theaioptimist.com/p/ai-gets-gettys-3b-brand-for-free"> legal system says the same thing to you</a>.</p><p>Spend hours refining prompts, making hundreds of creative decisions, shaping output until it’s exactly right. Someone else can take it, use it, sell it. You get nothing. When you admit AI was involved, your work loses protection.</p><p>So you stay quiet. Many pretend we’re not using the tool reshaping creative work at a speed and volume no human can match (or maybe should).</p><p>Why are we treating human creativity with AI the same way we treat a monkey with a camera?</p><p>And what does the shame around admitting you use AI, from both sides, reveal about what’s broken?</p><p>This isn’t about whether AI deserves copyright. It’s about whether creators working with AI deserve protection for their work.</p><p>Right now, the answer is zero. Not 25%. Zero.</p><p>The monkey got 25%. You get shame, silence, and zero protection.</p><p>Let’s talk about why, and what that 25% reveals about creative rights with AI.</p><p><strong>What happened in the Naruto v. Slater settlement?</strong></p><p>Indonesia, 2011. Wildlife photographer David Slater sets up his camera in the jungle.</p><p>Naruto, a crested macaque, grabs it and starts clicking. Many photos. Most are blurry, random, kind of what you’d expect from a monkey with a camera.</p><p>But a few? Perfect. Composition, timing, expression. The kind of selfies humans spend ten tries to get right.</p><p>They go viral. Wikipedia posts them as public domain with a simple explanation: the monkey took the photo, not the photographer.</p><p>Slater objects. He set up the equipment. He created the conditions. He made the monkey photos possible.</p><p>Then PETA sues on Naruto’s behalf. Not because they think the monkey deserves rights, but to make a point about animal rights and who controls creative output.</p><p>The court doesn’t debate whether the photos are creative. They are. The court doesn’t question whether they have artistic merit. They do.</p><p>The question is simpler: <strong>Without human creative control, is there anything to protect?</strong></p><p>The answer: No.</p><p>Not because the work lacks value. Because the law was built for human creators, and nobody knows what to do when creativity crosses species. And in our case, when it crosses into working with machines.</p><p>The case drags on for years. Slater’s exhausted. PETA wants a resolution. So they settle.</p><p>25% of future revenue from the photos goes to charities protecting crested macaques in Indonesia. Not because Naruto won. Because everyone wanted it to end.</p><p>Not full ownership. Not recognition as the creator. Just a cut.</p><p>The photographer keeps the rest, even though the monkey pressed the button. The monkey gets a percentage, even though the photographer created the conditions.</p><p><strong>Maybe the answer to “who owns this?” isn’t either/or.</strong></p><p>Maybe it’s not human OR monkey. Maybe it’s not human OR AI.</p><p>Maybe when different forms of intelligence work together, even by accident, what does fair look like?</p><p>Because right now, with AI, we’re not even asking that question. We’re just saying zero.</p><p>=</p><p><strong>Should I admit to using AI in my creative work?</strong></p><p>Reality, you probably shouldn’t if you’re even asking the question.</p><p>Not because using AI is wrong. Because admitting it sometimes costs.</p><p>You create something with AI. Spend hours refining prompts, making creative decisions, shaping output.</p><p>The Copyright Office’s position is clear: no human creative input that rises above AI’s contribution, no protection.</p><p>How much is too much AI? Nobody knows. Nobody will tell you. You won’t find out until someone challenges your work or there’s money involved.</p><p>Take Jason Allen’s Théâtre D’opéra Spatial. He ran 600 prompts through Midjourney, made hundreds of choices about composition and style, won a Colorado art competition. Then applied for copyright protection.</p><p>Denied. AI-generated, so no protection. The 600 prompts didn’t matter. The creative decisions didn’t count.</p><p>What’s a creator supposed to do?</p><p>You write an article. Use AI to help with research, maybe structure, some editing. Do you mention it? Do you check a box on YouTube saying you used AI?</p><p>Why would you? Admission means zero protection and convinces people the work isn’t really yours. Maybe it’s just scraped content from the internet, regurgitated.</p><p>So you stay quiet. Everyone stays quiet. And we pretend we’re not using the tool reshaping creative work at speed and volume no human can match. Or maybe should.</p><p>That’s the liar’s dividend. The reward for silence.</p><p>We don’t measure human-created work by what tools were used. We measure it by whether it’s original, inventive, new. Whether we like it.</p><p>Why is AI different?</p><p>Fear. The Scarlet AI. There’s this idea that admitting AI involvement means you’re not a “real” creator. That it diminishes the work. That you’ll lose protection, respect, everything.</p><p>Some people call creators using AI lazy or fake. Others like tech builders and AI engineers call creators greedy and entitled when they ask for permission, payment, and transparency about how their work trains these systems.</p><p>Both sides are shaming. Both sides are wrong.</p><p>And creators are caught in the middle, hiding their tools and their process because honesty is punished.</p><p>The conversation about what’s possible when different forms of intelligence work together never happens. We’re stuck in either/or thinking: Human or AI. Real or fake. Creative or automated.</p><p>What happens when different forms of intelligence learn to work together?</p><p>Right now, we’re too afraid to even ask.</p><p><strong>Why don’t AI creators have copyright protection?</strong></p><p>Because the law is asking the wrong question.</p><p>Courts keep asking: “Is it human enough?”</p><p>When they should be asking: </p><p>“Is it creative? Is it original? Does it show intention?”</p><p>The legal system was built for a world where humans were the only ones making creative choices. Now we have tools that can generate, suggest, refine; suddenly nobody knows how to measure what the human contributed.</p><p>So, they default to the simple rule: No human author, no rights.</p><p>It’s the same logic that denied Naruto. The photos were creative. They showed artistic choices: framing, light, expression. But without a human holding the camera, the law had nothing to protect.</p><p>We’re living that same logic right now. You make hundreds of creative decisions working with AI. You choose what works and what doesn’t. What to keep, what to throw away. That’s not accident. That’s intention.</p><p>How much human involvement is enough? </p><p>Who decides? Where’s the line?</p><p>The Copyright Office won’t tell you. They’ll just evaluate your work after the fact and decide whether you crossed some invisible boundary between “tool” and “creator.”</p><p>And the law can’t keep up. We’re still litigating cases from three, four, five years ago. AI evolves daily. By the time a court decides what was acceptable in 2021, we’re already working with completely different systems in 2026.</p><p>The question isn’t whether AI deserves copyright. It’s whether creators working with AI deserve protection for the choices they’re making.</p><p>Right now, the answer is: only if you can prove you did more than the AI did.</p><p>Good luck measuring that. Try asking ChatGPT that.</p><p><strong>Could a 25% revenue model work for AI and creators?</strong></p><p>Naruto’s settlement wasn’t about who was right. It was about ending a fight nobody could win.</p><p>The photographer didn’t get full ownership. The monkey didn’t get recognition as the creator. They landed on 25% of future revenue going to macaque conservation. Not because it was fair, because it was something.</p><p>And that number didn’t come from judges or juries. It came from two parties trying to figure out what made sense when the rules didn’t fit the situation.</p><p>How about applying that same thinking to AI?</p><p>Right now, AI companies take trillions of pieces of creative work - articles, images, code, music - to train their systems. What comes out isn’t what went in, so it’s transformative. Fair use.</p><p>Meanwhile, creators get nothing. No payment. No permission is asked. No transparency about what was used or how.</p><p>And creators using AI get nothing either. No protection for the hours spent refining prompts and making creative choices. No way to prove, or move beyond human only right.</p><p>What if both sides got something?</p><p>What if a percentage of the trillions in compute costs went back to the creators whose work trained these systems? Not full ownership. Not a veto over AI development. Just a cut that acknowledges their work made this possible.</p><p>And what if creators working with AI got protection for their output. Not full copyright, but something that recognizes the creative choices they’re making?</p><p>The monkey got 25%. Photographers using AI get zero. The creators whose work trained the AI get zero.</p><p>What if we stop arguing about who deserves what and start asking what makes sense when creativity isn’t cleanly human anymore?</p><p>That’s not a legal answer. It’s a practical one. And right now, we’re not even having that conversation because we’re too busy shaming each other.</p><p><strong>What creative choices are you making with AI that nobody sees?</strong></p><p>We’re all Naruto now. Picking up tools we didn’t build, making creative choices, the law doesn’t know how to recognize.</p><p>What are you not admitting you’re using AI for? What creative choices are you making that nobody sees because you’re afraid of what happens if you’re honest?</p><p>That silence is the problem we need to solve. Not with more lawsuits. Not with more shame from either direction.</p><p>But by talking about what works, what doesn’t, and what fair looks like when creativity isn’t cleanly human anymore.</p><p>We’re teaching primates to use tablets. AI is writing poetry and making music people listen to. Intelligence and creativity are showing up in forms our grandparents couldn’t have imagined.</p><p>We’re either going to keep pretending it isn’t or start building something admitting the reality: creativity knows no species barrier. And maybe that’s not something to fear.</p><p>Maybe it’s something to figure out together.</p><p>We’re monkeys learning to use a new camera called AI. We’re not just monkeys. But even if we are, we deserve better than nothing for our work.</p><p>The conversation starts when the hiding stops.</p><p><strong>RESOURCES</strong></p><p>* <a target="_blank" href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s_Rvxq_v-Ao">Sulawesi Video</a> - Restless Generation (Where Naruto was)</p><p>* <a target="_blank" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_dispute">Monkey Selfie Lawsuit</a></p><p>* <a target="_blank" href="https://newsroom-deezer.com/2025/11/deezer-ipsos-survey-ai-music/">Deezer/Ipsos survey:</a> 97% of people can’t tell the difference between fully AI-generated and human made music – clear desire for transparency and fairness for artists</p><p></p> <br/><br/>This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit <a href="https://www.theaioptimist.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1">www.theaioptimist.com</a>
December 26, 2025
<p>Ever notice yourself reaching for AI before trying to think through something on your own? </p><p>One sentence in an email, that’s all between me and the holiday weekend. Playing a live distractathon between things I must do and mind candy….I went for the candy.</p><p><a target="_blank" href="https://www.theaioptimist.com/p/what-is-ais-perfect-question-prompting">Not because I didn’t know what to say</a>. Because I’d get distracted when I started. So I ask ChatGPT to finish it. Then the next one. Then the entire email.</p><p>Few minutes later, I couldn’t draft anything without opening ChatGPT. <strong>And I’ve written a ton in my life. </strong></p><p>Now this passed, still I’m not alone. Many would be lost now if ChatGPT went away. Not likely, but still a ton of trust to put on something that’s not trustworthy yet.</p><p>→ People who once wrote easy to read emails, turn into corporate word salads→ People who made decisions in minutes now look to ChatGPT for confirmation (knowing they can’t trust the results).→ Creators who had strong voices can’t remember what they sounded like after AI cloning it all.</p><p>One person told me: “I used to just... know what to write. Now I don’t trust myself to start without AI checking it first.”</p><p>When <a target="_blank" href="https://www.theaioptimist.com/p/your-brain-beats-ai-how-to-make-chatgpt">we outsource the </a><a target="_blank" href="https://www.theaioptimist.com/p/your-brain-beats-ai-how-to-make-chatgpt">thinking</a><a target="_blank" href="https://www.theaioptimist.com/p/your-brain-beats-ai-how-to-make-chatgpt"> part of writing something else gets weaker</a>. The muscle turning rapid thoughts into clear sentences. The innate knowing when something sounds like you.</p><p>It’s not like you wake up one day unable to think. More like using a paper map in a GPS world:</p><p>* Reaching for AI before trying to figure it out yourself</p><p>* Feeling foggy when you need to write something important</p><p>* Not trusting your own judgment like you used to</p><p><strong>The cost of speed is your thinking and problem solving; your mind, perspective, and confidence.</strong></p><p>AI makes drafts in seconds, revises in seconds. Still we know speed and thinking aren’t the same thing, even if it’s really fun and easy to just use it.</p><p>What if the tool didn’t make us faster, but did make us dependent.</p><p>I’m not saying we abandon AI. I’m an advisor to one startup, and use it every day. Still the thing making us faster might also be making us... different.</p><p>Now is that different in a good way, depends on the person. Here’s what I’m testing, how to be different in my actions, and improve with AI.</p><p><strong>Your Voice: Is It AI or Unfakeable You?</strong></p><p>Most people can’t describe their own voice. It’s like asking a fish to describe water. I’m one of the fish here. (And AI hasn’t been much help beyond the obvious.)</p><p>Now let’s dissect it together. Not to criticize. To discover. I’ll share some of what came up for me, and play along, comment with questions. Everyone has their own way of using AI, which makes it less software and more you.</p><p>TLDR</p><p><strong>Question 1: How do you start sentences?</strong>Do you lead with questions? Statements? Stories?Look at the first line of each paragraph. There’s a pattern.</p><p><strong>Question 2: What words do you overuse?</strong>Not “AI” or “business”; everyone uses those.I mean the weird ones. I say “seriously” too much. “Honestly.” “Look.”Those aren’t professional. They’re mine.</p><p><strong>Question 3: What do you explain that others assume?</strong>Some people over-explain. Some skip steps.Neither is wrong. But it’s distinctive.</p><p><strong>Question 4: What do you avoid saying?</strong>I don’t use corporate speak. No “synergy.” No “leverage.” No “circle back.”That’s not style advice. That’s who I am.</p><p>Finding Your Voice with AI</p><p>Here’s what you’re going to do after this session:</p><p>Pull up your last 5-10 pieces of writing. Emails, posts, whatever feels natural.</p><p>Not your “best” work. Your normal work. Read them out loud. Yes, out loud.</p><p>Then answer (or ask AI to help you understand your own style):</p><p>* <strong>What phrases show up repeatedly?</strong>Write them down. Those are your verbal tics. Your signature.</p><p>* <strong>Where do you break the rules?</strong>Run-on sentences? Fragments? Starting with “And”?Don’t fix them. That’s your rhythm.</p><p>* <strong>What would you never say?</strong>List the words and phrases that make you cringe.This is as important as what you DO say.</p><p>* <strong>What stories keep showing up?</strong>I always come back to startups. To Remember.org. To the Camp Fire.Your recurring stories are your anchors. And also help AI get to know you from experience, but don’t send it everything. More below.</p><p>The Invisible Erasure by Choice</p><p>A sameness is spreading through web sites and socials, texts and emails, all in the same voice. Most don’t notice it’s happening and feel it’s better and easier than doing it themselves. Ask AI to revamp your writing following someone famous’s style, and it does exactly that. It makes your prose cleaner, more professional, less…you.</p><p>AI isn’t trying to erase your individuality. It’s optimizes for patterns, and patterns mean “sounds like everyone else.” AI was trained on millions of documents that follow certain rules. When you ask it to “improve” your writing, it’s really asking: “How can I make this sound more like the average of everything I’ve seen?”</p><p>Maybe you can know more about your own patterns and improve them, then relying on something to guide you to what everyone else likely would do.</p><p>The Voice Map Exercise</p><p>Here’s a practical exercise that works better than a prompt engineering guide: </p><p>Pull up your last ten pieces of writing—emails, posts, articles, whatever feels natural to you. Your normal work, don’t cherry pick the best. Let AI help with that.</p><p>Read them out loud. Your ear will catch patterns your eye misses. Have someone else read them out loud, or even better an Ai voice, then answer these questions:</p><p>* What phrases show up repeatedly? Write them down without judgment. I say “seriously” too much, “honestly” even more, and start way too many sentences with “Look.” These aren’t professional. They’re mine.</p><p>* Where do you break conventional rules? Maybe you use sentence fragments. Maybe you write run-on sentences that should be three separate thoughts but you like how they flow together with just commas because it matches how you think. These “errors” are your most distinctive patterns.</p><p>* What would you never say? Make a list of words and phrases that make you cringe. I don’t use “synergy,” “leverage as a verb,” or “circle back.” This negative space, what AI should avoid, defines your voice as much as what you include.</p><p>* What stories keep recurring? I always come back to startups, to Remember.org reaching schools worldwide, and to the Camp Fire. </p><p>* Your recurring stories are your anchors. They’re the experiences shaping how you see everything else.</p><p>* And AI never will have those anchors from experience…at least not soon. That’s your edge.</p><p>The Two-Pass Method</p><p>In the first pass, I use AI for idea generation. I ask for ten angles on a topic, ask for metaphors to explain complex concepts, and generate questions my audience might have; like an interview style where AI is interviewing me. </p><p>I get raw material that I rarely use directly, and it lets me know what most others are saying over and over again. </p><p>Knowing the average helps you not be average.</p><p><p>In the second pass, I write in my own voice. I create ideas out of the initial rough questions and AI answers. More as a guide and also what will likely sound like everyone else.The research is faster. The writing remains distinctly mine, or else I become that AI middle dreariness of squeaky clean perfection without the flaws I bring."There is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in" Leonard Cohen, Anthem</p></p><p>When It Matters, You Write</p><p>If it matters, you write it. You write emails to important connections, nurture those rather than relying just on AI to do it for you. </p><p>So how much of the overwhelming amount of communication and information do you really need?And is doing more and more of it solving the problem or adding to it?</p><p>Let’s say you did let AI draft something. The draft is clean but generic; could have been written by anyone. </p><p>Here’s how to put yourself back in:</p><p>* <strong>Add one hyper-specific detail.</strong> Change “in a major city” to something from your experience. Use the name of the street, the color of the light at that time of day. You can’t fake real.</p><p>* <strong>Break one rule on purpose.</strong> If AI gives three perfect paragraphs, split one into fragments. Or create a run-on sentence that violates rules but matches how you think through complex ideas.</p><p>* <strong>Admit uncertainty.</strong> Add “I’m still figuring this out, but...” or “Here’s what I’m seeing...what’s your take?” AI rarely admits doubt. You can.</p><p>* <strong>Add your signature phrase(s).</strong> Whatever your verbal tics that friends would recognize, include one. It’s like signing your work.</p><p>What You’re Actually Losing by Letting AI Do It All For You</p><p>It’s not just about “style”. You’re losing what makes people remember you. Who do you remember:</p><p>1. Perfect AI voice so clean it reeks of automation. To those receiving is you’re on auto pilot.2. Messy style with grammatical quirks they don’t fix, the stories activating the main point, the contradictions they show rather than hide.</p><p>AI smooths all of this out. When you feed it your writing and ask for improvements, it treats your personal patterns as errors to correct. </p><p>Your run-on sentence becomes three crisp sentences. Your conversational “Look,” gets deleted as unnecessary. Your specific memory of “Chicago in February, when even the lake looks angry” becomes “a cold city in winter.”</p><p>The Better Prompts Trap</p><p>Most people can’t describe their own voice. It’s like asking a fish to describe water. You’re so immersed in your patterns, they’re invisible to you. </p><p>You don’t realize you’re losing your voice because you never knew what your voice was.</p><p>And AI can help you do this in a way that’s hard for most to do it themselves.</p><p>Working Together, Not Automation</p><p>Think of AI like you’re making a documentary. AI is your research assistant.</p><p>It can:</p><p>* Find footage</p><p>* Suggest angles</p><p>* Draft rough cuts</p><p>YOU decide:</p><p>* What story to tell</p><p>* What to emphasize</p><p>* What to leave out</p><p>If you let AI direct the documentary, it’ll be like the drone of perfection saying little. Without human error and habits, things get boring. </p><p>Don’t be perfect, be you.</p><p>Real Example</p><p>I use AI every day for The AI Optimist. But here’s what I do vs. what AI does:</p><p><strong>AI’s job:</strong></p><p>* Research topics</p><p>* Find counter-arguments</p><p>* Generate headline options</p><p>* Format transcripts</p><p><strong>My job:</strong></p><p>* Choose what matters</p><p>* Write the actual script</p><p>* Add the stories</p><p>* Decide what sounds like me</p><p>The work is faster. The voice is still mine. And I train it (along with Claude Skills) to do this so much faster and better. I improve my voice, quarterly at first to get it right.</p><p>Your Action Step</p><p>Take something you need to write. Instead of asking AI to write it:</p><p>* Ask AI: “What are 10 ways to approach this?”</p><p>* Pick the one that resonates</p><p>* Write it yourself</p><p>* Use AI to edit for clarity (not style)</p><p>See how different it feels when YOU stay in control.</p><p>The Big Picture</p><p>We’re not trying to avoid AI. We’re trying to avoid becoming AI.</p><p>There’s a difference between:</p><p>* “AI writes like me” (you disappear)</p><p>* “I write with AI’s help” (you remain)</p><p>In a world where 90% of content sounds the same, the advantage is being undeniably, unfakeably YOU.</p><p>AI can’t do that for you.</p><p>But it can help you do it faster.</p><p>This is part one of a series on adapting AI to how you think, rather than adopting AI like everyone else. Next: “Why You’re Working More Hours Since Adding AI (And What to Stop Doing).”</p><p>Want to work through this live? I’m running bi-weekly sessions where we tackle real problems with real people. Ten minutes free, then deeper work for members. No frameworks, no corporate BS—just figuring out what AI should actually do for you. </p><p> [Learn more about live sessions.]</p> <br/><br/>This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit <a href="https://www.theaioptimist.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1">www.theaioptimist.com</a>
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The AI Optimist cuts through the usual AI noise connecting creators and tech to work together instead of fighting.
I'm a Creative AI Strategist who helps creators and businesses co-create with AI, turning humble machines into powerful creative partners.
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