I Hear My Own Voice

My interest in human-AI collaboration came out of the work I do in my professional life as a consultant and unofficial change manager, helping higher education institutions implement software to manage their systems.

Recently, my company has invested a great deal in layering artificial intelligence into our products and encouraging its use in employees’ workdays. In some cases, that use is effectively required, not through an official mandate, but because our workloads make AI almost a necessity rather than a luxury. We’re a successful company serving a lot of customers, and AI genuinely helps us do that well.

So I’ve had no difficulty integrating AI into my professional work, and that’s really where my interest in human-AI collaboration began. But I also use AI in my creative work. Whether I’m publishing essays on Substack, creating children’s books, or working on other creative projects, AI plays a very different role.

Recently, Substack announced that it was partnering with Pangram, an AI detection company, in an effort, according to the company’s CEO, to make the platform more trustworthy and reassure readers that the work published there was authentically human. Not surprisingly, the announcement was met with tremendous backlash from many Substack writers.

I find it incredibly ironic that Substack is using artificial intelligence to determine whether artificial intelligence was used in writing. But irony isn’t necessarily equal to funny. Writers pointed out that AI detectors have already cast doubt on the authenticity of human-written work, sometimes with serious consequences for the people who wrote it.

This is especially troublesome for people who write in academic settings, or whose writing style was formed there. That includes me. Academic writing rewards structure, precision, and clarity. Those same qualities can also appear in writing created or assisted by AI, which makes academically influenced work especially vulnerable to being misread by detection tools.

This is particularly relevant to my UNREDUCED framework. Although it grew out of lived experience and is entirely my own creation, it is still a philosophical framework. It is built on pillars and theories, and it has to be structured in order to be clearly understood. That means I often communicate it in a somewhat academic way.

When Substack made this announcement, I ran an experiment. I’m not sharing this as a defense, but because it illustrates a much larger concern. I use AI in my essay writing only at the very end of the process. The ideas are my own. The writing is my own, whether it’s handwritten, typed, or dictated. I use AI to edit out the “uhs,” false starts, and “hmms” that naturally appear when I’m thinking out loud. Over time, I’ve worked very hard to develop a style guide that allows AI to edit for grammar and, occasionally, clarity, without changing my writing or my voice. It has taken quite a lot of time to get that balance right.

So I ran one of my latest essays through Substack’s AI detection tool and was somewhat relieved to find that it came through as 100% human-written. Not surprised, because of course it was 100% human-written. But I was still somewhat grateful that it came out that way, which is ironic because I don’t need AI to tell me that I wrote my own essay.

But then I went back and ran my very first UNREDUCED essay through the tool. I had written it early on in my human-AI collaboration.

And that essay came back as 100% AI-written.

That was a blow to the gut. I fully admit that I used AI to edit, and it was early on in my work with AI, before I understood how to preserve my voice as carefully as I do now. But it was still sickening to see a tool label it as not my creation. I had run the experiment fully expecting, a bit foolishly or naively I suppose, that it would come back as 100% human as well. So I truly understand why so many creators on Substack reacted the way they did.

But what does this all mean? Does this mean we can’t use AI in our creative work at all?

I don’t think so.

First, AI is here, and it’s here to stay. Second, deciding not to use a tool that can be genuinely valuable simply because of what other people might think is self-defeating.

Some creators have never used AI at all, and some may never use it. And that’s okay. That’s a personal decision. But many of us do use it. My own use of AI in creative work started with very technical tasks. I used AI to understand how to format my books for Kindle Direct Publishing and how to edit images in Canva. AI saved me a great deal of time and frustration reading user manuals and working through endless trial and error just to figure out how to use those technical tools. And I’ll continue using it that way.

But I’ve also found it valuable as a brainstorming partner. I throw ideas at it and see what comes back. I ask it to find holes in my thinking or to help me determine whether an idea that seems wonderfully original to me has already been explored by dozens of other people.

And I dictate to AI. That saves me an enormous amount of time and effort because I simply can’t write or type as quickly as I can think. The ability to talk through my ideas allows my thinking to flow much more naturally. When I wake up in the middle of the night with the next best brilliant idea, am I going to sit up, fumble for a pen and paper, and squint through sleepy eyes trying to write it down?

Absolutely not. I have a tool that lets me dictate those thoughts, capture them before they disappear, and return to them in the morning. I’ll continue to use that tool.

Throughout history, humans have created new tools and learned to use them. Artificial intelligence is simply the most sophisticated one so far. Someday, it too will be replaced by something even more capable. The real question isn’t whether we should use new tools. It’s whether we can use them in ways that help us become even more human, more productive, and better able to bring our ideas, our art, and our creations into the world.

I titled this essay I Hear My Own Voice because that’s exactly what happens whenever I revisit something I’ve created.

When I read my essays, I hear my voice.
When I look at the images I created with digital tools, I see my vision.
When I read the stories I’ve written for children about love and loss, noticing and kindness, empathy and wonder, I feel my heart.

Does it bother me that an AI detector declared my first essay 100% AI-generated when it wasn’t? Of course it does. It’s tempting to go back and rewrite that essay. But I won’t, because that would be giving AI far more authority than it deserves.

When I read that essay, I hear my voice.

I don’t need AI to tell me when my creations are my own. And I don’t need a platform to certify that my creations are my own. What I need is to trust my readers.

I hear my voice.

I see my vision.

I feel my heart.

I believe my readers will hear my voice, see my vision, and feel my heart as well. If they do, they’ll keep reading. If they don’t, they’ll stop. That has always been the choice, from the days when writing was done with a quill pen and an ink pot to today, when I can dictate my ideas and use a technical tool to help refine them into an essay. It will always be up to my readers, my audience, my fellow humans, to decide whether my work has value for them.

And it will always be my choice to keep creating with my voice, my vision, and my heart.

Published 25 July 2026