HumanPrint: How to Use AI Without Losing Yourself

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 with good stan...

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 What a scatter plot a...

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...

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 c...

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...

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...

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 HumanP...

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...

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, bla...