HumanPrint: How to Use AI Without Losing Yourself

Christine "Ink" Whitmarsh

Christine Whitmarsh's popular podcast Your Daily Writing Habit (nearly 1,600 episodes produced) was about helping writers build a writing practice. Now, she's back with a new show - HumanPrint: How to Use AI Without Losing Yourself. HumanPrint is about protecting that practice — and yourself — in a very different landscape. It's still the same thread: voice, language, identity, and the daily choices that shape who you are. I'm just picking it up with a new subplot woven in: AI. This is a practical thinking show for people who are open to using AI, maybe even excited by parts of it, but are not interested in disappearing into it. Each week, we'll look at one place where your human signal — your voice, judgment, identity, behavior, or self-authorship — is vulnerable to drift, and one way to protect it. AI is being pitched as the tool we need to survive, hanging over people like a sword waiting to fall. HumanPrint is about learning to wield the tool without becoming the tool.

  1. 2d ago

    Make More Things Possible: A HumanPrint Interview with Emma Klint

    What if the most interesting use of AI isn’t doing the same work faster, but making entirely different things possible? In this episode of HumanPrint, I talk with designer and writer Emma Klint about AI as augmentation, using models to think out loud, wrestle with ideas, and expand what she’s capable of creating without handing over the thinking itself. We talk about why she sometimes asks AI to prompt her, what happens when a model rushes too quickly toward a finished deliverable, how her background in human-computer interaction shapes the way she sees AI interfaces, and why the blank chat box itself may be influencing how people understand and use these tools. We also get into learning, creativity, authorship, and the difference between generating more content and creating more opportunities for people to express experiences and ideas that might otherwise never make it out into the world. Learn more & connect with Emma: https://substack.com/@emmaklint

  2. Oct 22

    AI as Scaffolding, Not a Substitute: A HumanPrint Interview with Tracy Albinson

    What happens when you stop asking AI to work like everyone else’s tool and start building it around the way your own brain actually works? In this episode of HumanPrint, I talk with Tracy Albinson about the Portal, a custom system she built around Claude and Obsidian to support memory, executive function, writing, research, and the way she makes connections as a neurodivergent thinker. We get into AI as scaffolding rather than a substitute, why she deliberately limits what the system is allowed to do, the difference between memory and context, and how she uses AI heavily without handing over her writing, judgment, or autonomy. Tracy’s approach is deeply personal by design: build what helps, leave out what doesn’t, and keep yourself in charge of the process.

  3. Oct 1

    Replacing AI Fear With Fun: A HumanPrint Interview with Cookie

    For the first guest interview on HumanPrint, I’m talking with Cookie Young of The Neon Vegas — marketing heretic, synthetic era image provocateur, and boutique AI filmmaker — about what happens when you stop debating AI long enough to actually make stuff with it. Cookie takes us inside her filmmaking process, from writing the script and developing storyboards with ChatGPT to directing AI-generated video, editing, music, sound, and figuring out when the technology needs another round of direction…and when it’s time to say, okay, bro, whatever, this works. We talk about the parallels between AI filmmaking and traditional filmmaking, why “right” matters more than perfect, keeping your own vision at the center when you're working with generative tools, and the difference between showcasing what an AI model can do and using it to tell a story that actually belongs to you. And then there’s the idea that kept coming up throughout our conversation: fun. What changes when you approach these tools with curiosity instead of fear? What becomes possible when AI expands what you can create instead of becoming the subject of everything you create? Cookie has a pretty simple answer to all the endless talking about AI: Don’t talk about it. Be about it. So we did. And had a ridiculous amount of fun in the process.

  4. Sep 10

    Episode 18: Ship Anyway

    What are you waiting to create while the rest of the world argues about AI? In this episode, you’ll examine how uncertainty, criticism, and shifting standards can quietly delay your work, then use your own WHY, creative history, and controllable inputs to decide what you’re ready to make now instead of waiting for consensus.

  5. Sep 3

    Episode 17: Before AI / After AI

    Has AI actually improved your writing process, or just changed it? This episode gives you a practical way to compare how you worked before generative AI with how you work now, so you can identify what genuinely helps, what may be weakening your skills or voice, and which parts of your process are worth protecting.

  6. Aug 27

    Episode 16: Head Down, Eyes on Your Own Paper

    How do you protect your creative headspace when everybody seems to have an opinion about how you should write? In this episode, you’ll learn how to separate valuable criticism from noise, spot when imagined judgment is starting to steer your work, and decide who actually deserves influence over your creative process.

  7. Aug 20

    Episode 15: Set the Terms of Your Social Media Presence

    What this episode is about You can disagree with everything a platform is doing and still have your subscribers, income, archive, and professional network sitting on it. Leaving is an option. Staying is also an option. But staying doesn't mean accepting every feature or treating a tech company's business strategy as a moral instruction for your creative life. In this episode Why we need to stop reacting to each new feature as if it came from a literary friend who knows us personally. Karen Hao's Empire of AI and the competitive pressure driving companies to push costs onto workers, artists, and anyone whose data helps build the systems. My theory, labeled clearly as a theory, that distinctively human content is becoming more valuable precisely as it becomes harder to identify. Six boundaries worth setting: your process, scanning, your archive, direct access to your audience, unpaid platform labor, and knowing in advance what would make you leave. Plus recent research showing that AI accusations track social gatekeeping more than they track actual AI use, which means writing badly on purpose will not save you. HumanPrint homework Write your platform terms. Pick the platform where you publish or build professional relationships and answer five questions: What does it genuinely give me? What do I give back in work, attention, data, and revenue? Which parts of my process stay private? What do I need to export or protect somewhere I control? And what specific change would make me leave? Then take one action this week. Download your archive, export your contacts, update your site, or write your private AI-use boundaries.

  8. Aug 13

    Episode 14: Put the Torch Down

    What this episode is about Spotting AI writing has become an internet sport. Someone sees an em dash or a tidy structure and starts a forensic investigation from the comments section, and now the platforms have handed everyone official tools to do it. This episode is about why "I can always tell" is almost never true, and why turning readers into unpaid AI investigators is a bad trade for everyone including the people who think they're winning. In this episode Why "seems like AI slop" is a process accusation, not a quality judgment, and what happens to actual criticism when we stop asking whether the argument held up. Three possible motives behind these features: money, engagement, and data. Substack's Pangram partnership sitting alongside its MCP connection that lets publication owners pipe their data into ChatGPT and Claude. Why human fingers on a keyboard are not an ethical standard. And the movement from statistical estimate to moral verdict, which is where the real damage happens. HumanPrint homework For one week, refuse to play AI detective. Don't scan anybody's work, don't accuse a writer, and don't use "sounds like AI" as your explanation for why something didn't land. Name the actual issue instead. Was the language generic? Was the argument unsupported? Was the story missing? Be specific. And notice what the platform is asking you to report, label, and classify on its behalf. You don't work for the detection department.

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Christine Whitmarsh's popular podcast Your Daily Writing Habit (nearly 1,600 episodes produced) was about helping writers build a writing practice. Now, she's back with a new show - HumanPrint: How to Use AI Without Losing Yourself. HumanPrint is about protecting that practice — and yourself — in a very different landscape. It's still the same thread: voice, language, identity, and the daily choices that shape who you are. I'm just picking it up with a new subplot woven in: AI. This is a practical thinking show for people who are open to using AI, maybe even excited by parts of it, but are not interested in disappearing into it. Each week, we'll look at one place where your human signal — your voice, judgment, identity, behavior, or self-authorship — is vulnerable to drift, and one way to protect it. AI is being pitched as the tool we need to survive, hanging over people like a sword waiting to fall. HumanPrint is about learning to wield the tool without becoming the tool.

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