What AI Taught Me About My Own Sentences

I've been spending time lately bouncing ideas for a new novel off of AI. I've said this before and I'll keep saying it because people keep not believing me: I don't use AI to think for me. It doesn't create. What it's tremendously good at is ordering my chaos.

Here's the process. I take walks and talk into a microphone about the story I want to tell. Sometimes the words come out clean—the scene just flows, and I can hear it landing the way I meant it. Other times a sentence gets stuck halfway through, because I'm hunting for the right word, or because something I just said out loud triggers the grammar police in my head, who show up instantly to start deconstructing what I said for mechanical errors before I've even finished the thought.

I've had to teach myself to let that go. To say the less literary thing on purpose and keep walking. Absent inspiration, sometimes I fall into repetition just to get through a scene—the same phrase three times in a row because it's the only handle I've got on the idea right then. That's fine. I can revise it later. The point of the walk is to get the shape of the scene out of my skull, not to get the final sentence.

Then I hand the transcript to AI to help order it, and that's where it got interesting. I started noticing patterns—not in what I'd said, but in what came back. Places where the model had quietly cleaned up something that hadn't rendered cleanly from speech-to-text, smoothed it into something more "writerly," and I'd have to stop and say: hey, I didn't say that. I don't think I said that. What is that?

Chasing down those what is that moments turned into a small education in my own bad habits, and in the specific ways AI writes when nobody's watching it. A few of the terms I want to hold onto:

1. "Filed." This is a dead metaphor colony—one metaphor (mind-as-filing-system) that was fresh once and then colonized the whole narration. Every time a character noticed something, remembered something, dismissed something, it got "filed." The fix isn't synonyms. It's letting most instances collapse back into plain verbs: noticed, remembered, ignored, set aside.
2. "Arrived," for abstractions. The classic term for this is preciosity—over-dressed prose reaching for the fancier word when the plain one would do. My own padding instinct, the urge for a sentence to be about anything except the thing it's actually about, is periphrasis: saying it the long way to sound literary. Fowler had a name for the synonym-reaching cousin of this too—elegant variation, swapping in a fresh word each time so you never repeat yourself, even when repeating yourself would be clearer. I felt this one before I had a name for it: the sentence was being made longer on purpose.
3. "Sentence." Same colony problem as "filed." The book is about speech, so "sentence" quietly became the default unit for every utterance, thought, and plan a character had—even when none of those things are actually sentences.
4. "Fell back asleep without deciding to." This one's pleonasm—a qualifier that states what the verb already entails. Nobody decides to fall asleep, so the tail adds zero information while performing depth. The AI-flavored version of this is an agency-negation tail: "without deciding to," "without meaning to," "without quite," "without ever choosing to," bolted onto verbs that are already involuntary. It's a sub-form of a rule I'd already banned—the recursive-echo pattern, where a sentence restates its own action in a trailing clause. VOICE.md #10 even has my exact Chapter 4 example logged as a specimen. It survived an earlier sweep and snuck back in.

None of this came from a style guide. It came from reading my own words come back to me slightly wrong, often enough times that the wrongness had a shape, and the shape had a name somebody had already coined a hundred years ago.

People who say AI is making all of us dumb aren't using it right. Used this way, it's helping me learn—about my own tics, about the language, about the difference between what I meant to say and what I actually said out loud on a walk with a microphone in my hand.