My Dharumi Moment With AI: AI-Assisted Writing Without Losing My Voice

A few weeks back, I was talking to a relative of mine. During the conversation, he told me something that set me thinking.

“Anand, your writings look so perfect that people can immediately make out that they are written by AI. So make some silly mistakes to make them sound human.”

My first reaction was: why?

Why should I make mistakes deliberately? Why should I hide that I use AI? Why a spelling mistake to prove that I wrote the article?

That comment stayed with me. Not because I wanted to prove anything, but because it opened up a larger question. If people are going to look at AI-assisted writing with suspicion, then we also need to talk about how AI-assisted writing is actually handled.

As Vadivelu says, “Plan panni pannanum... okay?” AI-assisted writing also needs that only. You cannot take whatever AI gives and publish it directly. You have to know what you are trying to say, what you want AI to help with, and where you have to step in and correct the tone.

In a way, this was not very different from Dharumi’s situation in Thiruvilaiyadal. For those who may not know the reference, Dharumi was a poor poet in the Tamil film Thiruvilaiyadal, who got divine help from Lord Shiva to win a poetry contest in King Pandiyan’s court. He went to the court with a poem. The poem was good. Too good, maybe. And the natural question came: “Is this really yours?” That doubt did not come only from the poem. It also came from what people perceived about Dharumi.

Maybe AI-assisted writing also faces a similar perception problem. The moment people see a neat article, they may assume there was no real human process behind it. But that is exactly the perception I want to challenge. AI-assisted writing, at least the way I want to use it, is not a divine poem dropped into my hands. It goes through thinking, prompting, reviewing, rejecting, simplifying, changing, and finally checking whether it still sounds like me.

That is where the real discussion starts.

For me, writing is mainly a way to express what I think and feel. In real conversations, I may not always explain myself well. Sometimes I don’t have the time. Sometimes I don’t have the flow. Sometimes, being an introvert, I may simply keep quiet. But the thoughts are still there. The feelings are still there. The arguments are still there. They just don’t come out properly at the right time.

Writing gives me that space. It allows me to sit with a thought, turn it around, connect it with a memory, remove unnecessary drama, and finally say what I actually meant to say.

AI has helped me a lot in that process.

In the last six months, I have written nearly 25 articles. In a non-AI world, I don’t think I would have written so many. Maybe I would have written two. Maybe I would have only kept thinking about writing. The thoughts may have been there, but the distance between thinking and writing was too much. AI reduced that distance for me.

That does not mean AI is doing everything. It means AI is helping me take my scattered thoughts, examples, emotions, and half-formed sentences and put them into some shape. Earlier, many of these thoughts would have remained inside me. Now they have a better chance of coming out.

That is the good part.

But there is also a danger here.

Sometimes AI gives me a sentence that looks very polished. For one second, I feel happy. Then I read it again and think, “Ayyo, idhu naan illa.”

That is my alarm bell.

If the writing uses big English words that I would never use, it does not feel like me. If it sounds too sophisticated, it does not feel like me. If it sounds like someone giving a TED Talk after swallowing a dictionary, it definitely does not feel like me.

I prefer simple words. I like explaining things in layman terms. I like a little local flavour here and there. I don’t want my writing to suddenly sound like I became a person with TOEFL vocabs.

That is why I don’t want AI to make me sound perfect. I want it to help me express myself in my own voice, with my language limitations, and correct my mistakes. It can clean up my sentence. It can help me arrange my thought. It can point out where I am unclear. But it should not create a “me” that is actually “not me.”

Or to say it in Nithyananda style, I want the “me” to be actually me only.

This is the real tension for me. The issue is not whether AI is used or not used. The issue is what AI is being used for.

For me, this is the difference between augmentation and outsourcing. Augmentation is when AI helps me say what I already wanted to say. Outsourcing is when AI decides what I should say. If AI helps me arrange my thoughts, sharpen my examples, and express my own experience more clearly, I see that as help. But if AI invents my experience, opinion, emotion, or personality, then it is no longer just helping. It is writing on my behalf.

In Dharumi’s case, the poem came from Shiva. That was outsourcing, even if it was divine outsourcing. My situation with AI should not become that. I do not want AI Shiva to write the poem for me and ask me to simply carry it to the court. I want AI Shiva to help me shape my own rough poem better.

That difference matters.

We already accept many tools like this in other areas. We use calculators. We use spellcheck. We use GPS. We use camera correction. We use templates, grammar tools, filters, and many other things that improve our ability. We don’t usually say, “You used GPS, so you did not really reach the place.” We don’t say, “You used a calculator, so the answer is not yours.”

But writing feels different.

Maybe because language is very close to identity. When we read someone’s writing, we feel we are hearing that person’s mind. So if AI enters that space, people naturally become suspicious. I understand that.

If someone sends me a very emotional message and later I find out that every feeling in it was generated by AI, I may also feel cheated. Not because AI was used, but because the emotion was outsourced. So I don’t want to dismiss this concern.

At the same time, even in the non-AI world, is the author’s voice always as pure as we imagine? Many articles, speeches, and books go through editors, reviewers, content teams, publishers, and sometimes even ghostwriters. The final version may carry the author’s ideas, but the language may have been shaped by many other people.

Still, when we read it, we usually accept it as the author’s voice.

So maybe AI has not created this confusion newly. It has only made more people think about it. Earlier, this kind of help was available mostly to people with teams around them. Now even an ordinary person sitting at home can get help in shaping his thoughts. That is a big change.

For me, the responsibility is in how I use it.

When I edit an AI-assisted draft, I am not only checking grammar. I am checking whether it still sounds like me. Some lines may be very good, but I still change them because I would not say it that way. Sometimes AI makes a paragraph too smooth, and I have to adjust the tone till it sounds like me. Earlier I used to think editing means improving the writing. Now I feel editing also means protecting the voice.

Sometimes AI-assisted writing still gives me that Dharumi feeling. I give my rough thought, irritation, doubt, humour, memory, and confusion. AI Shiva gives me a polished sentence. I look at it and think, “Hmmm... did I write this?”

That moment is funny. But it is also serious, because I have to decide whether that sentence is really mine. Maybe the idea is mine, but the style is not. Maybe the sentence is good, but it needs to be brought back to my voice.

So no, I don’t want to add silly mistakes just to prove that a human wrote it. That feels artificial in another way. Fake mistakes are also fake only.

The goal is not to sound imperfect.

The goal is to sound recognizable and authentic.

If I use AI, I don’t want it to impersonate me. I want it to help me express myself better. I want it to help me write things that otherwise may remain stuck inside me. But I also want to make sure that when I read the final article, I don’t feel, “Idhu naan illa.”

Maybe this is the new responsibility for people like me who use AI for writing. We should not ask only, “Is this well written?” We should also ask, “Is this true to me?”

That question is more important than whether the grammar is perfect or whether the writing is sophisticated.

Because finally, I don’t want my writing to project a version of me that I don’t recognize. And worse, I don’t want to slowly start believing that this projected version is actually me.

I want it to be me.

A little clearer, maybe. A little better arranged, hopefully. But still me.

Maybe I am just Dharumi with better internet.

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