If you’ve been reading this blog, you’ll know that I grew up in northeast PA, in coal country. I’m 50% Polish, 100% Italian – and if that math doesn’t work for you, you’re thinking too hard. My father said “ting” instead of “thing.” If you could have asked my grandfather to describe my grandmother, he would say, “she beez crazy.” That’s not bad grammar – that’s the English that happens when Southern Italian immigrants land in the anthracite region and make the language their own. And it lives on. In fact, my niece still rolls her T’s longer than the Pocono ridgelines. (That’s not a typo – T’s, not R’s. “Puttttt it over there.”)
I inherited all of it. The words, the cadence, the way of expressing myself that doesn’t always follow the rules. In fact, I don’t always make sense to those who didn’t grow up in my area. The people closest to me who aren’t from my hometown had to learn NEPA as a second language.
Then I wrote a book, Reflect: A Perspective on Understanding Your Reality and Becoming Unstuck. Not a single drop of AI in it. Every word is mine – a dash of coal-speak, a hefty dose of imperfect grammar, too many exclamation points. I’m aware of all this. It’s a book about learning to see yourself clearly, about getting unstuck from the patterns that hold you back, written in the voice of a woman who was never trained to write “properly” but had something to say and said it anyway.
There’s an irony here that isn’t lost on me. I’m a pharmaceutical R&D leader who actively champions AI adoption. I spend the most recent years of my professional life advocating for intelligent technology in clinical development. And yet the most personal thing I’ve ever created has zero artificial intelligence in it. It’s raw. It’s human. It’s me on the page with no filter and no safety net.
But I wouldn’t change a word. To me, what matters is that those who read it walk away with new ideas about themselves – new ways of getting clear about what holds them back.
Here’s What I Think About AI
I love artificial intelligence. I want to be clear about that because people love to draw battle lines. You’re either for it or against it. I’m for it. Especially me. My brain runs faster than my words, and what does come out rides the NEPA express. I may not be the best writer, but I’m less concerned with perfection and more compelled to get the thoughts out. AI helps me do that. There are many reasons people use AI. Mine is simple – I just want people to understand what I’m trying to say.
What I see when I look at AI is something extraordinary; it is a reflection of our collective human experience. Our thoughts, our fears, our beliefs, our cultures, our ideas, our wisdom, our mistakes – all of it, distilled and available at our fingertips. That’s not something to fear. That’s something to embrace.
But embrace doesn’t mean surrender.
Scroll around on LinkedIn (or any social or professional platform). You’ll see beautifully crafted posts, flawless prose, polished thought leadership – and a growing amount of it has no direct human in the loop. People are posting AI-generated content without ever running it through their own thinking, their own experience, their own voice. The tool is doing the reflecting for them.
And that’s where we lose something.
AI is a mirror of what humanity knows. But what you’ve LIVED – the experiences shaped by where you grew up, how you speak, what you’ve been through – that’s yours alone. No model was trained on your great-grandmother standing on a porch in coal country with a chicken in one hand a freshly baked mulberry pie in the other. No algorithm carries the weight of your particular journey from stuck to unstuck.
You can use AI to help you think. You can use it to clarify, to research, to explore, to challenge your assumptions. That’s powerful. That’s what it’s for. And yes, AI makes mistakes too, because it’s still learning – just like us. That doesn’t make it broken – it makes it an honest work in progress. Same as any human who’s trying to get it right.
But when it’s time to say something that matters? You have to be in that loop. Your voice, your mess, your coal-speak if that’s what you’ve got.
I wrote Reflect right before AI started going mainstream. As time passed, I started to fear that my writing would stick out like a sore thumb. But now? Reflect sits on the shelf with no AI, no filter, and no apology. In a world that’s getting more artificially perfected by the day, it might just be a breath of fresh air for someone who wants to experience the raw human mind at work.
She beez crazy? Maybe. But she beez real.
More about NEPA Coal Speak here: What Growing Up Around Coal Taught Me About Honesty – Maria Lizza Bowen.