Where do you draw the line with AI?

I am automating everything with AI! Newsletters, LinkedIn posts, emails, everything! I built this on Claude! I will have agents do it all so I can hang out on my boat. Once a week I will have a human make sure it is all in check. I make sure people know this is written by a human and so on every piece of content I post, I include the disclaimer, "Written by a human." I write all of my own content and then check it with AI. I include a disclaimer at the end of my content. "Written by me, checked by AI."​ I purposely use em dashes and add typos because I LOVED using em dashes before AI and I don't want to stop, so I add the typos so the reader knows it was written by a human. I write my speeches with AI but take out the "To be honest," and "The truth is," bot like phrases. I prompt it to sound like me. Then I make it my own. No disclaimer.

These are all from very passionate posts on LinkedIn that I read over the past week.

When I read these and I couldn't help but feel my own sense of overwhelm with it all. We are definitely at an existential intersection with the integrity of what is human and what is machine. Well, some of us, at least.

I have certainly had my own internal debate over whether or not I should use AI to write. To automate certain tasks? Heck yeah! I had to book two airline tickets yesterday and I used Claude Cowork and it found the best options very quickly and even pulled up the pages so all I had to do was fill in my personal information and pay.

And yes, I do use it to help me with some of my writing. Mostly, quick emails or summaries of an idea that will be further expanded later.

And yes, I have used it to help me write my newsletters. Until recently.

And here is why I stopped.

I was struggling to recognize my unique voice. I felt like it was getting glossed over by the precision of a machine. My writing has changed because of AI. Because of the collective prompts fed into it daily by all of us and then spit out on the other end as vanilla.

Regardless of the voice and writing samples I fed into AI to write in my voice, it still didn't sound like me. And if it did, it kind of felt like I was playing the role of Christian in Cyrano de Bergerac where I was being fed the lines. What this did, however, was give me a little more courage and confidence to post ideas that I felt like I had a difficult time putting into words.

I don't believe there is a right or wrong choice here, but for me personally, it has been helpful to be clear about where my line is, and it's this newsletter— it will also be for the book I am writing and the speeches I get to give. Does this mean I won't use AI at all? Absolutely not. I will definitely be using it as my research tool and my brainstorm buddy.

It might take me an hour or more to write this thing— and that is something I am A-OK with because I am excited to reclaim the em dash as my own!

Thanks for going on this mindwalk with me. I am curious what your feelings are on this topic.