Let us return to the true soul-filled acts of reading, writing, and creating. Let us not be like voiceless birds who have forgotten their voice or how to fly. We can be like birds that have the strength to fly because of our feathers of human agency and creativity which help us to navigate and shift directions when needed. We can steer and rebalance ourselves, finding comfort, peace, and sanctuary as we return to our creative work that is rooted in our identity. With our feathers of human agency and creativity, we can handle turbulence. Empirical studies have shown how having a greater purpose in life alters the brain, contributing to flourishing and increasing resilience (Magsamen & Ross, 2023). Unfortunately, we are forgetting who we are with improvisation, walking away from our authenticity and creative path (Magsamen & Ross, 2023).
We should be holding the pen, allowing ourselves to be the author of our agency (Lull, 2026). When we write, read, play music, or create, we move into a creative flow state where time disappears. We find healing, spirituality, sanctuary, and grow when we engage in these life-giving activities. However, when we engage in consuming synthetic text, we are not guided into a creative flow state. We remain a caterpillar, unaware of our potential to transform. Rereading machine generated phrasing is causing us to slowly lose not just our words, but our stories that shape our identity.
In this current time, our world is in a state of disordered information, perceiving AI generated information as credible. People are giving away their human agency to automated systems that fool them with it’s unconscious bias and malinformation. Leaving out important information, we can all be too easily misled with information that we may think is timely, but is instead constrained in the last training data. Why are we turning to a regurgitation of text, an automation, a quick answer, or a mirror image instead of participating in soul-filled activities of reading, writing, and creating from our own human souls?
A Warning with Overconsuming AI Generated Text
I want to provide a warning to you about overconsuming AI generated text and with turning to human-AI communication instead of human-human communication. Turkle (2026) has done this very well in her new book which is referenced below and frequently shared in my 2026 conference paper, but I want to think about the impact that consuming AI generated writing and text will have on you long-term.
After experimenting with using Gemini Notebook for an assignment, I was left with these free verse thoughts running through my mind:
How I Feel After Consuming AI Generated Writing
Reading AI generated synthetic text feels like water running on my skin, yet I can’t feel it. It sounds like voiceless birds, flapping their wings too suddenly and then falling abruptly to the ground. It is like seeing 10 pieces of a puzzle while the other 5000 pieces lay still and quiet, packed up tightly in a dusty old puzzle box. I try to make sense of the 10 pieces, but I don’t see how the puzzle pieces connect. Blurry and hard to decipher, I slowly begin to see how 2 of the puzzle pieces fit together, but I can’t quite clearly discern the connections. My mind can’t connect the puzzle pieces because it connects the ideas for me. My mind can’t make inferences because it makes the inferences for me. My mind can’t embrace the written structure of AI when I can’t make the connections myself. Reading AI generated text feels like a window without a view, a door without a destination, and a flower without a bloom. It feels like a camera without a lens. It’s like trying to turn on the engine, but the car won’t start. The gas is out, and I do not feel like I am going anywhere. It is not taking me by my hand and telling me to go explore. I don’t get to play, improvise, or explore the way I would like to. I feel trapped within this structure.
Reading AI generated text feels like a blank stare looking back at me–joyless and absent. I am silenced, not knowing how to speak back. I feel frozen as I read synthetic text, meeting a stranger who is polite yet overconfident, telling me lists of what I should be thinking about. I feel like I am missing something or maybe it is someone. Absence makes the heart grow fonder, but this absence of human communication pulls me away and makes me feel even more lost. I do not feel the stir inside of my heart or the chills that come over me when I think of a new fresh insight or creative idea. I do not feel the warmth of human connection, and there is no creative interplay or exchange of ideas in a co-creation process. I am not in a state of improvisation, connecting ideas I would not normally connect. I am not uncovering hidden assumptions and making predictions. I am not evaluating and analyzing the greater reoccurring themes I would normally be seeing. It is flat and feels soulless.
I am not thinking about what it would be like to travel a mile or even a lifetime in another person’s shoes. I am not hearing the distant cry of a voice that carries a story that needs to be shared. I see their stories falling like dominoes one after the other until all of the stories have fallen down in a pile and have been all been put away. I hear the gasp when the stories come to a close inside of its chambers. My mind is as blank and still as the blank stare looking at me. Impoverished and motionless, I feel frozen, trapped in a structure that is not created for me to grow into. My mind is not like a rainstorm, flooding with ideas. There are no bolts of lightning with creative ideas coming to me. Instead, I am left to myself, uninspired and empty.
A Call for Structures that Retain Human Agency, Creativity, & Purpose
After doing this writing reflection after I experimented using Gemini Notebook, I realized the emptiness and lack of soul in AI generated synthetic writing. It made me think back on T.S. Eliot’s poem related to the hollow men–voiceless and stuffed. Are we stuffing our minds with straw when we are reading and consuming AI generated text? I think we are the passionate and soul filled men and women created with a purpose for life-giving human communication for human connection and community. We are not meant to be hollow and stuffed with AI generated content. It is engaging in human-AI communication that is a soul-less and a hollow frictionless experience (Turkle, 2026). We need to think, to write, to move forward, and to reflect to grow. We need structures that work for us while retaining our feathers of human agency, creativity, and purpose. We need to read soulful writings–the ones with human yearnings, perspective, and insight. We need the imperfect and messy voice of a person who is struggling to understand and make sense of the world around them because maybe when hearing their human voice, we can also be still enough to hear our own voice. We need to be able to hear from our own voice and be kind enough to ourself to listen to it. Our own unique writing voice can be drowned out when we read AI generated text. We need to hear our voice, purpose, and intuition. We can’t find our own writing voice or discover the beauty of the human soul when we do not take the time to read, reflect, and think critically or creatively.
What are we doing when we read human voices in writings, but just trying to make sense of an imperfect and beautiful world? We can lose our human purpose when we only focus on reading AI generated text–no longer explorers, navigating structures and systems with a rush of wonder, awe, and delight. I am left wonder-less, awe-less, and un-filled. Our hearts long for human communication that brings connection, community, and fulfillment–it is time to return to soul-filled human reading, so we can create human soul-filled writing, art, and music. We can move out of powerlessness, a lack of agency, and thoughtlessness when we move forward with the true soul-filled acts of reading, writing, and creating again. Creatives and artists can come together with scientists to create transforming structures, processes, and systems that have unexpected positive surprises while making humans feel more human (Magsamen & Ross, 2023). We must protect our feathers of human creativity, agency, and purpose, so we can continue to fly.
Note:
This writing response was done by Carolyn G. Mills for my blog as a call to action after researching structuration theory fall 2026 semester. Please see my fall 2026 conference paper if you are interested in reading more recent research about how structures and systems can be used in ways that protect human creativity, agency, and purpose.
All written content, images, and original ideas published on Getting Creative with Carolyn are the property of Carolyn G. Mills unless otherwise noted. You may share brief excerpts or link back to my post as long as full and clear credit is given to Carolyn G. Mills with a direct link to the original content. Full-article republishing without explicit written permission is prohibited. When referencing data, studies, or quotes from other authors, every effort is made to link back to the original source with proper attribution in a given Reference page at the end. Photography not by the author is also cited in the Reference page.
References
Ellaby, D. (2017). Tilt shift lens photography of person holding white feather [Photograph]. Unsplash. https://unsplash.com/photos/tilt-shift-lens-photography-of-person-holding-white-feather-h43VqtlnV7U
Lull, J. (2026). Evolution, structuration theory, and new research on free will. Communication Theory (1050-3293), 36(2), 95–105. https://doi.org/10.1093/ct/qtaf014
Magsamen, S., & Ross, I. (2023). Your brain on art: How the arts transform us. Random House.
Mehlenbacher, B., Balbon, A. P., & Mehlenbacher, A. R. (2025). Synthetic Genres: Expert Genres, Non-Specialist Audiences, and Misinformation in the Artificial Intelligence Age. Journal of Technical Writing and Communication, 55(2), 163-189. https://doi.org/10.1177/00472816231226249
Turkle, S. (2026). Artificial intimacy: Who we become when we talk to machines. Little, Brown and Company.