The "Human Touch" and Why I Was Wrong About AI.

Your story is too important to muddle, so be careful with how you tell it. That "human touch" everyone talks about isn't just the idea, or the prompt, it should be the majority of the project.

Let me preface this article by saying this: I am not anti-AI and I never will be, there are ethical challenges there but I believe it does more good than harm.

That being said—this is my opinion, and what works for me. It may not be the case for everyone, and for people who are just starting to find independence via the tools that AI can offer, this may be something you work on later.

The last thing I want to do is make someone feel ostracized for the use of AI. This is more so about setting yourself up for success via those very tools.

Simple input, simple output.

The more I create things, the less I write, and vice versa. Given that I produce and edit for others on a daily basis, it can get overwhelming pretty quickly. It’s very strange… less about time and more about the creative energy.

I have the time. I just can’t find the motivation sometimes when I’ve put too much energy in to one or the other medium.

For a while I used a pretty solid workflow to get my thoughts out of my head an onto a page quickly and in a way that didn’t disrupt the rest of my work.

I found summarizing my thoughts and having an AI expand them on "paper" is easiest, and shit it was efficient; but I'm beginning to realize it was helping me sell myself short.

Short of telling the stories I have in my brain, short of getting the words that are up there—out here, and short of truly finding clarity through the writing. (Yes, that’s an em dash written by a human, holy fucking shit!)

The best way I've found to solve this worry is to... well... write.

I would like to find a balance where writing and creating videos aren't mutually exclusive, but for now striking the balance means scheduling the time and finding my way around that.

It's difficult to figure that out alone, but it is also empowering when you get to the middle of that road and realize how much easier the walk itself is.

Let the creativity override you.

So I suppose I'm writing this to encourage the creative side of you to take over. But that’s not to say that AI can't have a place in the writing process.

I have put quite a bit of time into coaching a bot that writes like me, and that is still extremely valuable when I need to revise, edit and the like. It ensures that anything I need to add in can be seamlessly blended by the bot without having it tweak things too much.

I can write an entire section on my phone, and use AI to format how I like it, fix the grammar/spelling where needed, and move on.

Another great example: I will often format my substack articles with separators, titles and block quotes, and more which saves me time on the Substack side of things.

I even think that using AI to make a draft and then rewriting the draft can be a helpful tool to start learning how to write better.

That being said, I see it as a tool for growth, not a replacement for my actual writing like I saw it at first.

"Oh this is so easy, I can have it talk like me and get my ideas out there!"

Sure, Jake. Sounds great.

Get the idea out there, but the voice?

The emotions spent when writing?

Where is all of that? It's vacant, and it shows.

Let's "delve" deep.

Everyone is worried about em dashes and using the fucking word "delve" when in reality we should be reading between the lines:

If you can't feel anything when you read it, was there anything felt when writing it?

That's a loaded question, sure, but the more I ask myself that the more I have realized how easy it is to lose the plot using AI to write for me instead of with me.

Remember to use your voice, and show those emotions, because with all the new photo tools, video tools, and audio tools (Google's Veo 3 has audio & video and it's scary good.) the one thing that is glaringly obvious is the lack of human emotion.

When I used to pump out posts, they’d get likes! They’d have a few views on Wordpress. I’d use all the right tags, and all the right keywords. But there was no real voice, so it became this soulless conversationless mess.

Writing on Substack and truly finding my voice has become an insane bridge to community that I could not be more grateful for.

I’ve met some incredible people, made new online friends, and have started to blossom when it comes to my writing career. To be totally honest, I can’t even believe that is a sentence I can write in the first place.

TL;DR:

Your story is too important to muddle, so be careful with how you tell it.

That "human touch" everyone talks about isn't just the idea, or the prompt, it should be the majority of the project, with AI being the tool to help with the actual dirty work.