AI Can Never Express Your Way of Seeing the World

If you ask AI about art or love, the same prompt would give you a similar answer.

But ask 10,000 people, and you can get 10,000 different answers.

But what if those 10,000 people start writing with AI?

A July 2026 study from the Center for Humans and Machines in Germany compared how diverse the writing of 644 people is, with or without AI.

They specifically compared how people write metaphors with a task like:

Q: “What was it like to sit through a boring class?”

A: “It felt like [metaphor target]”

Then, they compared the human written metaphors with full AI-generated ones. To help the AI be more creative, they prompted the AI model to assume diverse personas based on the actual backgrounds of the human participants.

Even with those diverse personas, AI-generated metaphors were more similar to each other than those produced by any of the human groups. And humans who used AI for ideation, produced less diverse metaphors than those who came up with their own ideas.

So, at least from this study, the human perspective resulted in more diverse overall responses. And when people used AI to help them with their answers, the diversity decreased.

Intuitively, that makes sense to me.

I see writing as an expression of our rich inner worlds, constructed from thousands of chaotic experiences tied through a web of feelings, thoughts, and intuitions. Collectively, our inner worlds hold an infinite amount of variation.

And AI comes in and sands it all down.

And it's not AI's fault. I cannot imagine even the smartest superintelligence expressing what it feels like to live through an experience it never had. Let alone come up with 10,000 of those embodied experiences.

That reminds me of the famous park-bench scene in Good Will Hunting.

Sean talks to the math prodigy:

“You've never been out of Boston?"

“Nope."

"So if I ask you about art, you'd give me the skinny of every art book ever written?

"But I bet you can't tell me what it smells like in the Sistine Chapel."

So, I hope you continue to keep writing. And get better at it. As AI can never express the way you see the world.