All You Have

 
Consider this:
With one vital exception, when it comes to writing everyone has access to the same stuff. We all know the fundamental plot archetypes and their associated tropes. We all know which genres are currently hot and which aren’t. We all know the Three Act Structure and the Hero’s Journey and Save the Cat and the Anatomy of Story and all the rest… or could find them at a moment’s notice if we deemed it necessary.
 
Heck, we all use the same twenty-six letters of the alphabet, we all have access to the same half-million words in the English language, and we can all read the same novels for inspiration if we want.
 
What we—as individuals—have that no one else has, however, is the unique way we tell a story… from what we choose to show the reader to how we decide to pace it to the vibe of the story down to the critical details of how we arrange our specifically chosen words to achieve the effect we want within the reader’s mind.
 
In other words, our unique voice.
 
That’s it.
 
That’s all we really have, as a writer. And it has so much more gravity than plot or structure or subject matter. Just today I heard someone discussing their favorite author. They basically said that when a new book comes out from their fave, they don’t really care what it’s “about,” they go find it and buy it and read it… because they know they’re going to get what no one else can supply—a story created and told by that specific person, in the way that only they can do.
 
And someone else “writing the same kind of stuff” (subject matter, setting, plot structure, genre, tropes, etc.) is almost always a piss-poor substitute for the real deal… because they don’t have the secret sauce… the mojo… the voice… of the original.
 
But when you ask for text generated by a Large Language Model algorithm (ChatGPT, OpenAI, Claude API, Sudowrite, etc, etc, etc.), what are you actually getting? You’re getting the predicted “most likely next entry” (word, sentence, paragraph, etc.) based on your prompt and all the input the program was trained on. So you’re getting an amalgamation of what it predicts “the average writer on the internet” might say next. (Because the majority of its so-called training comes from scraping things online.)
 
In brief, you’re getting a non-voice. A paint-by-numbers mashup of lowest-common-denominator phrases. (And I would hope this is intuitively obvious to even the most casual observer, but there is no actual intelligence in “artificial intelligence.” Even that term is just a sales pitch to make us think the results come from some super-smart digital intellect instead of what’s basically auto-complete on steroids. The algorithm has no self-awareness, no knowledge of the meaning behind its output, and no ability to actually reason out its responses.)
 
Leaving aside the trumpeting bull elephant in the room—which is that current LLMs are stunningly bad at actually writing and editing fiction—you’re still giving up the one thing you have that really matters:
 
Your voice. Your vibe. Your sense-of-life. Your specific way of looking at the world. All the way down to the unique, compelling way you have with words. All of which are what makes your writing special.
 
Really, you’re giving up you.
 
To put it mildly, I’d recommend against that. Because you’re also giving up the only real compelling reason to put words on the page in the first place—to get your one-of-a-kind perspective out into the world.
 
But writing - or editing - by taking a digital poll where you constantly have your finger in the breeze—crowdsourcing the question of “What word should be used next?”—is completely antithetical to the core of what writing’s actually about.
 
I mean, you’re a writer. You can figure that shit out.
 
It’s what writers do.