Author Dave Eggers argues that outsourcing your voice to AI is "a crime against yourself." A story from Paul's own flight last week shows exactly what he means, and why it matters well beyond writing.
Bestselling author Dave Eggers has a message he says he now repeats in high school classrooms nearly every week: don't let a machine speak for you.
Let's hear your truth, even if it's raw, even if it's unpolished.
Eggers argues that today's students are the first generation actively encouraged to let AI write and communicate on their behalf, and that doing so costs something real. Every person's perspective is unique. Handing it to a machine to smooth over doesn't just change the writing, it silences the one thing about a person that can't be replicated.
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Listen to today's Automotive State of the Union episode for the complete discussion, additional context, and the conversations that shaped our perspective.
"A Crime Against Yourself" Is a Strong Line. Is It a Fair One?
It's a provocative claim, and it's worth sitting with rather than dismissing. Eggers isn't arguing AI has no use. He's arguing that when it comes to expressing your own thoughts, your own perspective, your own truth, letting a machine do that instead of you trades something real for something merely polished.
What Happened on a Plane Last Week
Here's the part of this conversation that made the idea concrete rather than abstract. On a recent flight, Paul spent the trip writing his thoughts about the business, and his own vision for it, out by hand. When he read it aloud afterward, it landed differently than anything written with AI's help ever had, more direct, more specific, unmistakably his.
That's not a rejection of AI as a tool. It's a real, first-hand data point supporting Eggers' actual argument: something changes when the words come straight from a person instead of being run through a layer of processing first, even a good one.
What This Means for Your Store
This applies well beyond writing. Every customer-facing role in your dealership runs on the same tension Eggers is describing: a sales conversation, a service explanation, a review response, a follow-up text. AI can remove friction and save time in all of those places. It shouldn't be doing the talking.
Worth a genuine gut check on your own team's customer communication. If every email, post, and response is running through AI polish before a customer ever sees it, ask whether the actual person behind it is still audible, or whether the voice customers are supposed to be trusting has quietly been replaced by something smoother and less real.
