Reading Between the Lines

Contains human generated content - can you spot the difference?

I’m not particularly good with words, so I’m guilty of running my clunky, half-baked thoughts through Chat GPT to help me transform them into something more succinct, refined and “palatable” for the intended audience – although not wholly in this case.

If you’d like to do an experiment with me to test your sensitivity to “reading the room”, read on…

Below are 2 articles on the same topic. One is written by me without any input from ChatGPT and the other is written by ChatGPT based on a few prompts from me. 

Read them both and notice what you notice.

Reading Between the Lines (Version 1)

I’ve been thinking about what happens when we ask AI to write for us.

Not whether the writing is good. Often it is excellent. Clearer, tighter, more eloquent. Sometimes irritatingly better than the sentence we were struggling to construct ourselves.

But I wonder if something else gets lost in the process.

A little bit of our voice.

When we write something ourselves, our words don't arrive perfectly formed. We hesitate. Delete. Choose one word over another without quite knowing why. We leave in an awkward phrase because somehow it feels more us. Our experiences, emotions, beliefs and intentions are quietly shaping the language as it emerges.

The words carry more than information.

They carry intention.

Perhaps even energy.

I don't necessarily mean energy in a scientific sense. I mean that strange human quality we recognise when someone's words really land. Two people can say almost exactly the same thing and somehow one moves us while the other doesn't.

We are reading the words.

But we're also reading between the lines.

AI can reproduce many of the visible characteristics of our writing. Give it enough context and it can learn that we like short sentences, provocative questions, warmth, humour, particular turns of phrase. It can become remarkably good at mimicking what we call our tone of voice.

But I'm beginning to wonder whether tone of voice and voice are actually the same thing.

One is a pattern in the language.

The other may originate somewhere much deeper.

And perhaps this matters because we're increasingly tempted to give AI our rough thoughts and ask it to make them articulate. I do this myself. It's enormously useful. But each time we bypass the struggle to find our own words, are we also bypassing one of the ways we discover exactly what it is we think?

Writing isn't simply the transcription of thought.

Sometimes writing is where the thinking happens.

The hesitation, the searching, the almost-right word, the sentence we rewrite six times — perhaps these aren't inefficiencies to eliminate. Perhaps they're part of the process through which something internal becomes uniquely ours.

So I'm not suggesting we stop writing with AI.

I'm wondering whether we should become more conscious of which part of the writing we give away.

Let AI sharpen our words. Challenge them. Help us find clarity when something we can feel hasn't quite found language yet.

But perhaps we should be careful not to outsource the source.

Because AI may learn to mimic the tone of our voice.

But can it ever mimic the energy of the intention behind it?

Reading Between the Lines (Version 2)

I’ve noticed, when I read AI-generated articles, I instinctively find myself skim reading – impatiently bouncing off the surface looking for something with depth to dive in to.  Despite the read being beautifully articulate, pithy, even provocative – somehow the words carry no energy.  They seem flat, barely capable of holding my attention and it’s happened too many times for it not to “be a thing”.

Have you experienced that, or is it just me?

It’s as if a silent layer of communication is missing and I wonder what that might be.

As I’m writing these words, whilst I’m thinking, unsure where they are heading exactly - they are coming directly and intentionally from me, from my source, my energy field.   When you read these words, perhaps you are not only comprehending the words I’m sharing, but the spirit from where they are coming.  What if every word we speak is infused with intention, spirit, consciousness - so we commune beyond words?

When I paint, I’m very aware that every brush stroke is imbued with my soul.  My energy pours into the canvas, leaving an energetic signature.  Perhaps the same is true of our voice and our words. 

I wonder if when we “click and collect” i.e. run our words through AI and then paste the sanitised version straight into a presentation or post, we have given away some of our voice.  Maybe some invisible thread between the words and their originator is severed in the process.

We wonder if AI is or will become sentient.  I love that this question is being asked because ultimately, we will have to deepen our exploration of what it means for humans and the nature of the soul. 

What if “soul” was the invisible presence that’s missing between the lines of AI-generated text. If we give away our voice to AI, perhaps we are giving away a powerful connection we didn’t know was there.

I hope that by the time we understand more about sentience, consciousness and the soul, we haven't already outsourced some of the human practices through which we might understand them.

There are no prizes for guessing which is which!

I’m more interested in something way more subtle than that. 

Did you feel the difference between the two?  Let me know.