Writing isn’t just communication; it’s self-discovery and self-creation.

When AI shapes our stories, we don’t just lose words. We lose ourselves.

Narrative sovereignty in AI means refusing to let a machine narrate the most human parts of your life.

This morning, I stumbled on an email I'd fired off to a friend on one of those days when everything was on fire. It was raw and clumsy, full of half-formed thoughts and feelings too intense to clearly articulate. As I was reading it, a thought hit me: if I’d written that email today, I might well have asked an AI to clean it up.

And any of the current generation of large language models would have done an excellent job. It would have found crisp formulations for my confused feelings and subtle images for my aching thoughts. By the normal standards of communication, it would have been an objectively better email. But something important would have been missing.

“We tell ourselves stories in order to live,” writes Joan Didion in her classic book The White Album. I think that’s right. We tell stories about our experiences in order to make sense of them, to give them meaning and sometimes even beauty. Stories aren’t just an add-on to our lives—in some real sense, they are our lives.

Here’s an example that might help explain what I’m getting at. Think of someone in great pain, joints and limbs aching, gasping for breath, forcing herself to move, to try to run—so much pain that she even loses control of her bodily functions. And still she pushes and strains, one step after another. Rough, right?

Well, now try to imagine something even more difficult, something Camus said about Sisyphus: We must imagine her happy. How on earth is........

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