Your stories don’t just communicate who you are. They create who you are. Don’t let a machine write them.
KEY POINTS
- Writing isn’t just communication; it’s self-discovery and self-creation.
- When AI shapes our stories, we don’t just lose words. We lose ourselves.
- Narrative sovereignty in AI means refusing to let a machine narrate the most human parts of your life.
This morning, I stumbled on an email I’d fired off to a friend on one of those days when everything was on fire. It was raw and clumsy, full of half-formed thoughts and feelings too intense to clearly articulate. As I was reading it, a thought hit me: if I’d written that email today, I might well have asked an AI to clean it up.
And any of the current generation of large language models would have done an excellent job. It would have found crisp formulations for my confused feelings and subtle images for my aching thoughts. By the normal standards of communication, it would have been an objectively better email. But something important would have been missing.
Me.
The Power of Stories
“We tell ourselves stories in order to live,” writes Joan Didion in her classic book The White Album. I think that’s right. We tell stories about our experiences in order to make sense of them, to give them meaning and sometimes even beauty. Stories aren’t just an add-on to our lives—in some real sense, they are our lives.
Here’s an example that might help explain what I’m getting at. Think of someone in great pain, joints and limbs aching, gasping for breath, forcing herself to move, to try to run—so much pain that she even loses control of her bodily functions. And still she pushes and strains, one step after another. Rough, right?
Well, now try to imagine something even more difficult, something Camus said about Sisyphus: We must imagine her happy. How on earth is that possible?
This is how. She’s not torturing herself. She’s running a marathon to raise money for the favorite cause of her beloved mother, who passed away last year. Every step, every shooting pain, every gasp for breath—his is love, this is her telling her mother, “Mom, thank you. I miss you. I love you.”
That’s just a story. That’s all it is. She’s taking the events of her life, the perceptions and sensations, the physical movements, the memory of her mother, the pavements under her feet, the wind against her face and the faceless crowds cheering—she’s taking all of that, and she’s making a story out of it, giving meaning to physical and mental experience.
That’s all it is, and that’s all any of our lives are. A collection of stories, some big, some small, all connected and interwoven, entangled with each other and with the stories that other people tell about their own lives.
And we don’t just create our lives with our stories—we also create ourselves. In his account of identity, the psychologist Dan McAdams argues that a person comes to understand who they are by weaving the remembered past and the imagined future into a continually evolving story that gives life some unity and purpose.
The Problem with Letting AI Tell Our Stories
Increasingly, we are turning to AI to help us tell our stories. We use it to draft our emails, to “improve” our reflections on something that matters to us, to “sharpen” our descriptions of meaningful events and feelings and thoughts. And while I do this myself, I want to suggest that we need to be very careful about this; in particular, I want to highlight two dangers of doing it.
First, we lose the process. As McAdams’s research suggests, we don’t just report on our lives after the fact; we become ourselves through the act of shaping our stories. The struggle to find the right word is an essential part of the work of becoming ourselves. So, when AI takes over the writing, it doesn’t just save us time, it removes us from the very activity through which we come to understand who we are.
Second, in a sense, we lose the story itself. The story AI writes isn’t fully ours. It’s a statistically plausible version of what someone like us might say, assembled from the patterns of millions of other people’s words. It often reads beautifully and it might even move the person who receives it. But it’s not the record of a particular human being making sense of a particular life.
Narrative Sovereignty
There’s a term that thinkers writing about Indigenous media use that I keep thinking about here: narrative sovereignty, which is the power of a people to tell their stories for themselves. I don’t mean to collapse that larger political and cultural meaning into the question I’m asking here. But I do think the concept illuminates something in the context of AI, too.
Each of us has a stake in telling the story of our own life in our own voice, however imperfect that voice may be. A sovereign nation does not hand over its laws to a neighboring power, however efficient or well-intentioned that power may be. In much the same way, a sovereign self should be wary of handing over its defining stories to a machine, no matter how fluent or polished the machine’s version might sound.
Some acts of expression are also acts of self-creation, and those need to remain in our hands. And that’s what narrative sovereignty is about when it comes to AI: refusing to let the most human parts of your life be narrated for you.
Practices to Protect Your Narrative Sovereignty
Protecting your narrative sovereignty doesn’t require abandoning AI. It requires knowing when to set it aside. Here are some practices I’ve found helpful.
- Write the messy draft first. Before you prompt an AI, write it yourself. All of it. The confusion, the clumsy words—that mess is where the meaning is made. Some of it may be smoothed out at a later stage, but letting that process unfold in stages means that we can find our meaning in it rather than driving to the finishing line of the marathon.
- Keep a personal space. Maintain a journal, a notes app, a voice memo habit—some place where your unfiltered voice lives. No AI. This is your narrative home ground.
- Ask: Is this a task or a story? Not everything you write is identity work. A Monday morning status update to your team: Few of us are finding our identity here, so use whatever tools are available to make the writing process as easy as possible. But when the writing is about your relationships, or it’s writing to someone you care about—that’s a story. And you need to be sovereign in the telling of your stories.
Your Story, Your Voice
Remember the marathon runner: every step agony, every breath a gasp, her body failing her in ways she can’t control. No one watching would call it elegant. But she gets to decide what those miles mean, because the story is hers.
So is yours. Don’t let anyone else tell it for you.
[Source: veneratio/Adobe Stock]
Original article @ Psychology Today.
