Bot Becca, You're Fired
AI turned my armpit-sweating land negotiation story into 'a professional summary of reading the room.' That's not my book. That's Bot Becca.’ And she's fired.
Corporate Exit Diaries - November 8, 2025
This week I made a mistake.
I let AI edit a chapter of my book.
Not organize it. Not fix typos. Not help me pull content from a 58,000-word manuscript and stitch it together (that's been invaluable).
🤦♀️I mean I actually let it rewrite my voice.
And holy shit, did it fuck that up.
What AI Did to My Chapter
I've been working on Chapter 10 this week. It required pulling content from multiple sections of the original manuscript, adding new material, and making it all flow like one cohesive story.
The organizing part? AI crushed it. Helped me find the Jerry land negotiation story, the home-building metaphor, the career progression content—all scattered across different chapters. Pulled it together so I could see what I had to work with.
That part was gold.
Then I got ambitious. Or lazy. Or both.
I thought: "You know what would save time? Let AI clean this up. Fix the grammar. Tighten the prose. Make it better."
So I sent the assembled chapter back and asked for an edit.
What I got back was technically correct. The grammar was perfect. The sentences were clean. The structure was logical.
It was also completely fucking lifeless.
Two major stories I'd written, full of details, humor, and personality, got mashed down to a few sanitized paragraphs. My sailor mouth? Gone. The Harvard voice bit where I talk about my armpit sweating profusely during negotiations? Condensed to nothing.
The Jerry story, where I'm standing in too-tight pants and red stilettos that puncture the gravel, painting on my biggest smile while this guy on a four-wheeler clearly wants me to leave—became a clean, professional summary of "a negotiation that required reading the room and appealing to the seller's motivations."
That's not my book. That's a business article.
That's Bot Becca. And she's fired.
The Real Cost of Efficiency
Here's what I learned: efficiency isn't worth losing your voice.
AI can help you organize. It can help you assemble. It can fix your typos and catch your grammatical fuck-ups (and I have many).
But it can't protect what makes your work yours.
Because AI is trained on everything. Which means it defaults to the average. The safe. The version that sounds like it could've been written by anyone.
And "written by anyone" is exactly what I'm trying NOT to create.
I'm not writing a business book with tidy lessons and professional case studies. I'm writing a memoir about outgrowing every cage you build—including the ones you built on purpose while thinking you were being smart.
That story requires the mess. The profanity. The too-long tangents about negotiating land while pitting out. The Beyoncé references and the self-aware moments where I catch myself slipping into Harvard voice.
Bot Becca doesn't do any of that. She's efficient. She's polished. She's boring as hell.
And she's not who I want showing up on the page.
What This Week Actually Looked Like
Beyond the Bot Becca disaster, this week was a mixed bag.
The Good:
Down 34 pounds (as my teenager would say: "Okay baddie, you're killing it")
Office looks exactly how I want it—shout out to my husband who spent hours 3D-printing a skull, sanding it, priming it, painting it, and adding a badass gold hue
Hung the piece of art I bought in Kenya made from banana tree bark
Recorded a podcast episode for "The Bird's Nest" about business owners finding their missing something—the good, the bad, and the messy middle of entrepreneurship
The podcast went really well because I was candid AF, which is a beautiful thing when you meet people who are cool with cussing and are "your people"
The Chaos:
Kid got hand, foot, and mouth disease PLUS strep (I thought HFMD only happened to young kids—what in the actual crap, Batman?)
Balls-deep busy with client work
Professional webinar next week that I scheduled in April and honestly forgot about until I got tagged in a post
The Big Decision: Had a discovery call with a potential new client. Loved the business owner—he's my people. But working together would be a doozy, and taking them on would derail getting the book edits done.
The money would help pay for publishing expenses. But there won't be a book to publish if I dive into the woods with this business.
So I'm proposing something different: foundational marketing work that sets them up for success, starts in January, and buys me time to finish the damn book.
We'll see how they respond.
But here's what I know: I can't say yes to money if it means saying no to the thing I've been building for five years.
Where the Book Actually Stands
The edit process has been more time-consuming than I thought.
I know people usually hire editors, but guys... I have a lot to sort through. Writing a book over five years means it's basically "old Becca" and "new Becca" throwing up on pages. Not pretty.
This week I consolidated and pulled from two chapters, added new content, and stitched it all together. I have a master revision guide that maps it all out, which helps keep me guided.
AI has been helpful for organizing, fixing grammatical errors, and mapping the three parts of the book. But when I let it actually edit on my behalf? That went really, really wrong.
It mashed my stories down to paragraphs. Ditched my sailor mouth. Turned me into Bot Becca.
And I won't do that to you.
So I had to redo everything it tried to "help" with. Long story long (because brevity isn't my jam), stitching content together is faster with AI, but protecting the voice? That's all me.
Overall progress: about 15% through the revision process, with two of the five new chapters complete.
Sigh.
It's arduous. But I know in the end I'll have something people laugh at and love.
The Lesson I'm Taking Forward
Tools are just tools.
AI can help you organize. It can help you assemble. It can speed up the parts that don't require your specific voice.
But it can't replace what makes you you.
The mess. The tangents. The stories that are too long but too good to cut. The moments where you catch yourself being performative and call it out. The profanity. The humor. The humanity.
That's what people connect with. Not the polished version. Not the efficient version. Not Bot Becca.
The real one. Armpit sweat and all.
So yeah, AI can help me organize my manuscript. But it's fired from editing my voice.
Because I'd rather take longer and sound like myself than finish faster and sound like everyone else.
If you've read this far, you'll be one of the readers when this beast of a bitch is complete.
XOXO,
Becca
(I said that in the Gossip Girl tone, btw)
