Hey, it's Mukundan from Data and AI with Mukundan.
Have you ever written something that looked right,
sounded right, but just didn't feel right? Like
you hit publish on a blog post and instead of
that warm glow of, yes, I nailed this, you feel
kind of hollow? I've been there multiple times.
So one day I just stopped guessing and I built
an AI to tell me the truth. This is a story of
how I exposed the emotional blind spots in my
writing using artificial intelligence. It's a
part emotional wake -up call, part tech deep
dive and all very very personal. So stay with
me here. So I'd just written a 1500 word blog
post. I did everything right. I outlined it.
I edited it. Reworked the sentences. My grammar
was solid. My ideas were clear. But after all
that work, something felt off. You know that
feeling when someone smiles at you, but their
eyes don't? That's what my writing felt like.
On paper, it was fine. But emotionally, disconnected.
Distant, in fact. And it scared me. Because why
wouldn't it, right? Because I wasn't trying to
be cold. I was trying to connect. Deeply. So
I asked myself the question, that would change
everything. What if I'm not writing too poorly,
but too impersonally? And that thought haunted
me. Until I did something kind of crazy. So I
built an AI app to... Tell me the emotional truth.
My words were hiding. So if you don't know me
already from my previous work, I built a ton
of little AI apps, I would call it. So these
are like just simple AI apps that I use to make
my life better. Because I think AI is here to
help make us reach unbelievable heights. It's
here to make our life really easy. And, you know,
building an application using AI, that is just
my way of, you know, using AI to benefit my life.
And I'm hoping to help others do the same, right?
So that's what I did here. I built an AI app
to tell me the emotional truth that my words
in my blog post were hiding. So here's what I
built. It's a simple Python based app. It uses
streamlit library in the backend, but it analyzes
the tone of what you write, paragraph by paragraph.
One model is from Hugging Face, which is a website
where you get these amazing open -sourced models
to use. So it could be something like image -to
-text classifier. So basically, I mean, so image
-to -text conversion, so something where you
want to... convert an image to text or text to
an image the hugging face website would give
you these models to use which are open source
and it could be someone from facebook or could
be someone from airbnb for example right they
could be open sourcing these models and making
them available to you so that you can use it
to build that amazing text to image classifier
or text to image converter that I know you can.
So in this case, I used this model from Hugging
Face, like I mentioned. It detects emotions.
It detects joy, frustration, sadness, excitement.
And the other I used was GPT -4, which is the
latest, one of the latest at this point. um gpt
is from chat gpt it at this point i think it
would be a bit more older but i mean yeah it
is a gpt by chat gpt it tells me what tone it
hears whether it's confident apologetic casual
or robotic yeah if those don't match up the app
flags it That's the emotional mismatch. And that's
where my writing is betraying me. I ran my blog
through it. And paragraph by paragraph, I saw
it. My intro was meant to be uplifting. But it
read uncertain. My conclusion was supposed to
feel powerful. But the AI called it resigned.
And I had to sit with that. Because it was right.
So I used that feedback to rewrite the post,
not just for clarity, but for that connection.
That's when my writing started to feel like me
again. So here's where I went deeper, right?
I wanted the tone detector to know me, to know
my quirks, my voice, my style. So I trained a
model to use my own writing. So I labeled these
paragraphs as this is neutral or this feels warm
or this is trying too hard. Then I fine -tuned
a model on those labels. Now, when I run new
writing through it, it doesn't just judge me.
Based on these generic emotion categories, it
checks if my writing sounds like me. Not like
a perfect writer, but like a real one. And that's
when something magical happened. My blog started
getting more comments like, this really spoke
to me. I wasn't trying harder. See, I wasn't
trying harder. It's just, I was trying to be
real. And being real is what helps you connect
with people, right? And surprisingly, AI got
me there. So here's what I learned. We spend
hours tweaking grammar, structure, word choice.
But if the tone's off, none of it lands. Tone
is invisible, but it is everything. It's... Why
a helpful email feels condescending. It's why
a passionate tweet sounds arrogant. It's why
your heartfelt blog sounds robotic. Yeah, I just
do this robot voice. So we are blind to our own
emotional inconsistencies. But AI, it doesn't
flinch. It reflects. It shows us our blind spots.
And if we are brave enough to look, it can help
us connect in ways we didn't even know we were
missing. So let me ask you something. When was
the last time you asked your words how they feel?
You asked how your words felt exactly, right?
Previously, I was just trying to give these words
a person. I mean, a feeling of a person. But
like if you asked how your words felt to people
or maybe to yourself, just ask that to yourself.
Not just what you said, but what you meant and
how it actually landed. So you can try building
the app that I have linked in the show notes.
So the whole code is on there. You should be
able to build it yourself. It's pretty easy and
it's free, obviously. Free with the medium membership.
Just copy paste a paragraph of your writing into
ChatGPT and ask, what is the emotional tone of
this paragraph? You might be shocked. You might
be validated. But either way, you'll be more
aware. Because that's what makes great communication
today. Not perfection. Not even cleverness. But
honest, emotionally resonant connection. Hey,
so that's all for this episode. But if this resonated
with you, please share this episode with a friend
who writes, blogs, or speaks for a living. Better
yet, share it with someone whose words matter.
Because the world doesn't need more content.
It needs more felt truth. It needs more truth.
It needs people to be more themselves. And thanks
for listening to Data Anya with Mukundan. And
see you in the next one.