Have you ever read an email, text, or article that feels eerily familiar and competently bland?

You may be reading something devised by ChatGPT or other AI LLMs (large language models), a feature more and more common in online communication. You may have even used this yourself, in the wish to save time or improve your own writing style.

While there is a case to be made for AI as a potential research tool or brainstorming agent (though those, too, are debatable), stylistically, AI leaves a lot to be desired. Sure, there are usually no egregious typos, and one senses a generic professionalism evident in AI writing. But, to use an outdated term, there is no “soul” in the writing, no “I” of subjective, lived experience.

This might be tolerable for formal reports or writing “busy-work” but the danger is when this creeps into other parts of our lives and begins to speak through us, ventriloquizing our speech in contexts that matter—love, family, interviews, opinion, and even self-concept. If we are, in large part, an effect of language—shaped and organized by the words and phrases we use about ourselves and........

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