Voice & Authorship

In a world where AI can write just as well, if not better than you, how do people know that your writing is your writing? It's incredibly easy to have AI help you write something, and it's easy to slip from AI as an advisor to AI as the author without even realizing you did it.

Your writing has a "finger print". It could be words you regularly use, or spelling mistakes, or how you use punctuation. You might notice in my writings they I often times use parenthesis to provide examples or side commentary... that's a common fingerprint of my writing style. This is called your writing "Voice". People who specialize in writing (such as English teachers or publishers) are really concerned about whether your writing actually has your voice in it.

There are times when your voice does not matter in writings (Resumes, for example, don't really have a voice). There are others where it's vital (a cover letter, or the letter of recommendation written for a student).

It's your responsibility to understand where these lines are and what is and isn't appropriate for AI writing. Often, things are pretty black-and-white, but there are sometimes these wide gray areas where a situation can be appropriate to use AI to write material, but the same type of writing in a new situation makes it completely inappropriate to use AI anything.

In 2026 Thélyson Orélien, a Haitian-Canadian, was on tour in France for his book, "It Was Either That Or Die" when his book was accused of being written in partnership with AI. AI detection often misflags content as having been AI-generated, and proof has not been made that his book was written by AI, however, enough evidence made this questionable enough that the author's book was removed from being considered as a candidate for a prestigious prize. (https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/25/world/europe/thelyson-orelien-ai-canada-haiti-france.html?campaign_id=158&emc=edit_ot_20260928&instance_id=182686&nl=on-tech&regi_id=148528743&segment_id=227220&user_id=a25d75ed019c39591cb7507eef24ae2e)