How to Keep Your Writing Weird in the Age of AI

Today is the last day of our quarterly ”think week,” when we take a step back to both reflect and generate new ideas to build for you in the coming months. We'll end our week of re-upping Katie Parrot's pieces about work and technology with a rumination on how to preserve your unique voice when writing with AI—one of our favorite topics.—Kate Lee

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I was deep in a rabbit hole about textual criticism and the Bible when my ChatGPT tutor pointed me toward a concept that completely changed how I think about writing with AI.

Lectio difficilior potior. The harder reading is stronger.

It's a principle scholars have used for centuries. When faced with two versions of an ancient text and asked which is the original, they choose the one that's more difficult to understand. The thinking is that somewhere along the way, some well-meaning copyist, intentionally or otherwise, tweaked the original to make it clearer or more sensible according to their understanding. I'm going to call this cautious copyist a “timid scribe.”

The moment I read about this concept, I saw AI playing the role of timid scribe everywhere in my own writing. Where I might write "altar-call energy," AI defaults to "enthusiasm." Where I talk about "collecting screenshots like a doomsday prepper," it recommends "documenting examples." I fed this very essay to the AI editor I’ve tailored for my Every writing, and Claude Opus 4 pruned away the spiky edges of my opening sentence in the name of editorial efficiency:

AI takes what's specific and makes it general. It takes what's wrinkly and makes it smooth. The consequences are already visible: Scroll through any business blog, marketing newsletter, or LinkedIn feed, and you'll see the smoothing happening at scale.

AI hasn't created this problem, but it's accelerating it quite a bit. When everyone has access to the same polishing tool, we risk a kind of digital invisibility—millions of pieces of content, all professionally adequate, none memorable.

As I talked to ChatGPT about this classic principle of textual criticism, I gained language for something I'd been noticing but couldn't quite name: AI is our era's timid scribe. It’s a well-meaning assistant that takes your weird original and makes it sound like everything else. And learning to work with it, not against it, might be the most important writing skill of our time.

The smoothing engine at work

Last week, I was writing a social media post about Every's value proposition and started with this:

"Most Every subscribers don't know what they're paying for."

I asked LinkedIn's built-in AI to refine it. The suggestion:

"Most Every subscribers may not be fully aware of what they're paying for."

Look at what happened there. The AI version added hedges ("may not be"), softened the language ("fully aware" versus "don't know"), and became considerably more professional. It also became bland, beige, and forgettable.