# Thursday Thoughts: I Wrote a Book to Escape the Sameness of AI. I Started Writing it Before AI Became THE Thing!
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When everyone is empowered with the same magic, is there any magic to be had? That's one of the biggest wquestins you must ask yourself today - and it's what I wrote into the Foreword of my latest book. Two weeks ago I retired a ten-year streak of Daily Inspiration posts. This week I want to talk about a different streak: four years spent writing and rewriting a book that, on the surface, has nothing to do with AI. But in retrospect, has EVERYTHING to do with AI! Being Unique took four years. I started it in the fall of 2022, right around the time ChatGPT landed and reordered everyone's expectations of what a machine could do. I finished it this July, in an era where AI can write your emails, your code, your keynote deck, and your apology text to your spouse, all in the same flattened voice as everyone else's. Here's the passage from the Foreword that explains why a book that never mentions AI in 200-odd pages turned out to be, in my opinion, the most important thing I could write for this exact moment. "If one thing has become evident, the magic of AI also leads to a crushing sameness—in the way that people think, act, learn, express themselves, share their thoughts and develop their ideas. When everyone is empowered with the same magic, is there any magic to be had? When I set out to write this book, I did not have the idea of AI in mind. Through four years of writing and rewrites, edits and more edits, I resisted the temptation to turn into a scribe against AI, as an antidote to the impact of AI, and as a pathway to escape the sameness of AI. And yet, maybe that is exactly what it is." I didn't set out to write an AI book. I set out to write about the thing I've circled back to more than any other theme across ten years and 2,582 Daily Inspiration posts: conformity is the enemy, not just of creativity, but of the future itself. I saw the same argument show up somewhere I wasn't expecting it. Yesterday I was on stage at the 2026 Governance, Risk and Control Conference, talking to auditors and risk officers about what I'm calling the Acceleration Gap—the growing distance between how fast risk now moves and how slowly our institutions are built to respond to it. Breakout times measured in minutes, sometimes seconds. Governance still running on quarterly reviews. One of the slides in that deck says it flat out: Curiosity is now a control. Not a soft skill. A risk-management capability. Curious teams spot emerging risk earlier. Static expertise misses weak signals. The dangerous auditor isn't the one who lacks knowledge—it's the one who doesn't know what they don't know. That is not a coincidence. It is the same argument, wearing a different suit. Being Unique has an entire chapter on this exact link—The Link Between Curiosity and Uniqueness—and the case it makes is identical to the one I made in that GRC ballroom: the people and organizations who stay curious are the ones who see what the standardized, AI-flattened, dashboard-driven version of everyone else cannot. The next slide in that same deck argues fluency, not deep technical mastery, is the new expertise—knowing enough about AI and agent architecture, data provenance, machine identity, to ask the right question before the wrong decision gets made. That's the unique-thinking edge again: bridging unexpected connections, bringing a distinctive perspective to a problem before it becomes conventional wisdom. An algorithm optimized for the average case will never be the one who asks the question nobody else thought to ask. Here's how the Foreword ends. "As I complete this book in an era where AI has given everyone the same tools, the same information, and increasingly the same output, that argument feels less like an observation and more like a warning. Your ability to be unique might be the very thing that saves you in this moment of sameness! Don't be like everyone else. Be your own self!" That's not a marketing line I bolted on after the fact. That's the actual close of the actual Foreword, written in July, after four years of work I nearly let AI talk me out of finishing. Turns out it's also, apparently, a pretty good description of what keeps an auditor ahead of a breach. If you want the rest of it: unique.jimcarroll.com.

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Source: https://jimcarroll.com/2026/08/thoughts-i-wrote-a-book-to-escape-the-sameness-of-ai-i-started-writing-it-before-ai-became-the-thing/