HumanPrint: How to Use AI Without Losing Yourself

What this episode is about

Spotting AI writing has become an internet sport. Someone sees an em dash or a tidy structure and starts a forensic investigation from the comments section, and now the platforms have handed everyone official tools to do it. This episode is about why "I can always tell" is almost never true, and why turning readers into unpaid AI investigators is a bad trade for everyone including the people who think they...

What this episode is about

Substack just partnered with Pangram to let readers scan your posts and get a percentage estimate of how much was human-written. LinkedIn added a "Seems like AI slop" report button. So your options are now: submit to the scan, explain yourself in advance, or turn the scanner off and let strangers decide what that means. No thank you. Your creative process is yours before it's anybody else's information.

In ...

What this episode is about

WHY gives your writing fuel. HOW gives it a voice. WHAT is where most people lose the thread, chasing trends and algorithms instead of their own curiosity. My own interests - mapping human writing voices, the history of innovation, combinatorial creativity, scoliosis research - don't share one clean underlying question. I don't think they need to.

In this episode

The difference between stated preferences and...

What this episode is about

Every time another "how to spot AI writing" post shows up, my response is the same: how do I know YOU wrote it? Before you accuse anyone else of using Gen AI, can you actually name what makes your own writing recognizably yours? Spotting Gen AI is the easy part. Spotting yourself is the harder, more useful one.

In this episode

The three places voice actually lives: rhythm, story, and humor. Staccato versus l...

What this episode is about

I started writing at seven and spent most of my childhood thinking of it as a talent, not a compulsion. Then a life-and-death medical situation sent me into nursing instead, and it wasn't until I came back to writing years later, through screenwriting, that I understood the difference. Talent can sit on a shelf. Identity follows you around whether you feed it or not.

In this episode

Why the writers who finis...

What this episode is about

In May 2025, the Chicago Sun-Times ran a summer reading list with ten books that didn't exist — fabricated by AI, submitted by a freelancer who later said "I do use AI for background at times but always check out the material first. This time, I did not."

That sentence is the whole episode. Not a story about someone with no standards. A story about someone wit...

What this episode is about

Each data point represents one pixel of the human experience. That's a stats idea, but it's also a writing idea — the word is the pixel, and the human experience that generated it is what gives it meaning. AI can produce words without the human experience underneath them, which means the pixels are there but the picture might not be.

In this episode

Wha...

What this episode is about

In 2024, Air Canada's chatbot gave a customer the wrong information about bereavement fares — and when he filed a claim, the airline tried to argue the chatbot was basically its own separate entity, not their responsibility. The tribunal said no. And that ruling is the whole episode: you don't get to outsource the judgment and keep the authority. Those two things travel together.

What this episode is about

This episode starts with scoliosis research and statistics, which may or may not be what you signed up for. But it's connected—because the same person who ran exploratory factor analysis in SPSS is also the person who had a titanium rod fused to her spine and somehow ended up doing acrobatics in her forties. Same person, different container. The problem starts when you confuse the container with the ...

What this episode is about

People know when they're hearing Bob Dylan. The question is, do you know when you're hearing yourself? A lot of people have never really developed the habit of hearing their own writing voice, and AI makes it very easy to mistake fluency for improvement. This episode is about tuning into your own signal before you hand your writing over to be "improved."

In this episode

Why "finding your voice" is the wrong ...

What this episode is about

AI has become the most rigid, literal editor in the world—determined to stamp out your unique writing messiness every time you color outside the literary lines. But some of your real voice lives in the roughness. This episode is about why the weird, unpolished parts of your writing might be the most valuable parts, and what happens when you let AI sand them off.

In this episode

Emily Dickinson's fight ...

AI can help organize, summarize, brainstorm, and sharpen your thinking. The trouble starts when the tool begins making decisions that belong to you.

In this episode of HumanPrint, Christine Whitmarsh looks at the line between useful support and outsourcing your own judgment. From core message to emotional framing, some parts of the process need to stay in your hands on purpose.

This week’s HumanPrint check: write down three thi...

Polished writing used to suggest effort. Now AI can produce it in seconds, which means “sounds good” is no longer enough.

In this episode of HumanPrint, Christine Whitmarsh looks at the difference between a strong voice and a polished one, and why the prettier sentence may not be the sentence that actually sounds like you. If your writing sounds smooth but strangely generic, that smoothness might be covering over the pla...

What happens when your writing still sounds polished, but no longer sounds like you?

In this first episode of HumanPrint, Christine Whitmarsh introduces the idea of drift: the subtle way generative AI can pull your writing, voice, and point of view away from your own human signal before you realize it’s happening.

This episode, HumanPrint itself, comes from a more useful place than the tired, black and white, pro-AI versus anti...