The Uniqueness of your Writing Voice

In the book Language Unlimited (2019), the author David Adger starts with a thought experiment.

I want to begin this book by asking you to make up a sentence. It should be more than a few words long. Make one up that, say, spans at least one line on the page. Now go to your favourite search engine and put in the sentence you've made up, in inverted commas, so that the search engine looks for an exact match. Now hit return.

Question: does your sentence exist anywhere else on the internet? I've tried this many times and each time, the answer is no. (Adger, 2019)

Adger also tried Googling a random sentence from the British National Corpus, an online collection of texts with over 100 million words in it. He took the following sentence at random and then did a Google search for it: "It's amazing how many people leave out one or more of those essential details."

There were no other examples.

Adger concludes:

It seems crazy, but sentences almost never reoccur. (Adger, 2019)

Don't Outsource your Unique Voice

Adger's example highlights a critical observation for a writer. There are plenty of articles about developing your individual voice as a writer. Google itself estimates there are ~2.4 million online. I don't have a proper source for this so let's assume it's somewhere between a few and a whole lot.

The simple fact is, your voice is already individual. "Sentences almost never reoccur".

How Humans Create Sentences vs How an LLM Creates Sentences

There is a basic difference as to how we form sentences as humans, and how a Large Language Model like ChatGPT creates them.

An AI does not have an overarching idea of what it is trying to express. It is like a super-dooper-mini-cooper autocomplete. If you give it a prompt, it looks at its corpus of data and calculates the next word based on mathematical probability. It asks, statistically, what should the next word be? It then selects that word and moves onto the next blandy blandy bland one.

It searches out the most probable word. This is of no interest to writers, is it? to find the most average word possible.

Joyce once spent a while day working on two sentences. He said had the words, he was just looking for the perfect order for them. You also do this, perfectly, naturally, originally.

How do humans build meaning, then? Adger says we have three things - a sense of linguistic structure, that the structure is governed by laws of language, and that it emerges through "self-similarity." This is how he explains it:

Linguistic structure builds meaning in a hierarchical way. Words cluster together and these clusters have special properties. A simple sentence, like Lilly bit Anson, is a complex weave of inaudible, invisible relationships. The words bit and Anson cluster together, creating a certain meaning. Lilly connects to that cluster, adding in a different kind of meaning. Laws of Language, universal to our species, govern the ways that this happens. (Adger, 2019, p. 3)

He explains why we can use our languages with such flexibility and creativity in the book, arguing that throughout Nature, "when life or matter is organized in a hierarchical way, we see smaller structures echoing the shape of the larger ones that contain them."

He argues that we find this property of "self-similarity" everywhere, from the structure of fern fronds to forks of lightning. Adger argues that this also holds true for human language.

Phrases are built from smaller phrases and sentences from smaller sentences. Self-similarity immediately makes available an unending collection of structures to the speaker of a language. (Adger, 2019, p. 3)

Charlie Munger would say, know the game you're in. Us and LLMs - we're in different games.

Don't Outsource your Leaps of Imagination

Writing is more than just putting things on a page. It is how you learn and make connections. It is how you order and make sense of all the input coming your way

To not do your own writing will put you in a place where your learning is shallow. You will not have recall of key concepts in a subject that you can link ideas out from and built upon unless you engage deeply with them. You do that by writing.

Einstein said that the seventh wonder of the world was compound interest. Learning compounds in a similar way to money. Little by little, it adds up. In any subject, the writing is how you access your creativity. If you adopt shallow learning techniques, remember you may pay for it down the line. If you always rely on an LLM to make links for you, to remember facts, you are out-sourcing your leaps of imagination.

What will differentiate you from people who are just as able as you to put a few prompts into an AI app as yourself? Your creativity. And this is a hard won thing, but it is something which gives joy. Also, why would you not want to practice your writing skills as much as possible. That is how you get better at it. Also, it's a lot of fun. There's no teacher over your shoulder. You can do exactly whatever you like.

I think the best learning tool is Obsidian. It shows the power of writing and linking ideas. I have a rule, I never paste AI text into my Obsidian. I need to be able to explain it simply to myself.

Re-Writing AI Text - Blaaaargh.

Generative AI is a black box. Even the people who built it aren’t entirely sure how it works. Yes, you can change the prompts, but you might find yourself with a piece of text that you need to rewrite. This is harder than rewriting something you wrote in the first place. It will be more work to improve it. 

Ernest Hemmingway said “The only kind of writing is rewriting.” Missing out on such an important part of ordering your thoughts will lead to a piece of work that won’t reflect your unique voice.

So how should I use an LLM

It is excellent for building up a frame of reference about a subject. You can use it to find leads on interesting sources, papers, people who are writing or talking about a subject.

And then you can go to the source itself and build from there. It'll give you a better foundation on which to build.

It also helps remove self-consciousness from learning, If you don't understand something, ask the LLM to explain it in a simpler way, and keep asking it for simpler versions until you get what you want.

I wrote more about this process in this post - How to Leverage A.I. in your lifelong learning journey.

I write about ethical use of AI in grant writing in another post.

SOURCES

David Adger, Language Unlimited (Oxford University Press, 2019) - this is an Amazon Affiliate link.