Remember 2015? Ah, those halcyon days! We were all still figuring out what “the cloud” really meant for us, wondering if smartwatches would ever really take off, and frankly, blissfully unaware of how much AI was about to reshape our world. Well, recently, I stumbled down a rabbit hole of my own making, dusting off some old blog posts from that very year. And honestly? What I found was both enlightening and perhaps even a little bit alarming.
How Content is More Than Just Words
You know, when you write, even a little, you develop a style. It’s like a fingerprint, right? Unique, individual, and utterly yours. Or so I thought. Rereading those 2015 articles, I had a revelation that was harder to swallow than an ungreased Wellington boot. My writing, back then, had a wierdly AI style to it, maybe without all libraries of ’leveraged’ knowledge, but certainly with some of the hallucinations, fun as they were. I particualtly notice the dashes - something that in 2025 is a trait of the current default system prompt narrative responses, so that style was mine. If anyone I knew suffered one of the arduous emails that I would write on occasions, I used dashes as a way to break up the text, to add emphasis, or to create a pause for thought. I mean, how do you emote, or give context to a sentence without a good dash? It was like I was channeling some early, pre-GPT version of AI writing, long before I even knew what that meant.
The Emperor’s New Prose
This whole trip down memory lane got me thinking about the current landscape of writing, especially with the explosion of AI tools. You see, there’s a real danger, a sort of modern-day “Emperor’s New Clothes” scenario, that writers today, especially those who don’t have a strong personal style, might unwittingly fall into.
Imagine a writer, perhaps feeling the pressure of content demands, who leans heavily on AI to generate their posts. The AI, being a reflection of the vast textual data it’s trained on, often produces content that is technically correct, grammatically impeccable, and logically structured. It’s efficient, it’s fast, and it sounds… well, it sounds like a lot of other AI-generated content.
The problem arises when these writers, much like the emperor in the fable, become convinced that this technically perfect, yet ultimately generic, writing is the pinnacle of their craft. They might even believe it’s better than their own, more flawed, more human voice. And the audience, perhaps not even consciously aware of what’s happening, might start to perceive content as increasingly interchangeable, losing that vital connection to a unique authorial voice.
AI’s Open - But You Might Not Be Seen
We risk creating a digital landscape where everyone is wearing the same ‘invisible’ writing, indistinguishable from the next, devoid of personality, humour, or the beautiful imperfections that make human communication so rich. The true test, then, isn’t whether you can write like an AI, but whether you can write so authentically, so uniquely, that no AI would want to truly replicate it. It’s about finding your own voice, polishing it, and letting it shine through, even if it means a few mixed metaphots or an incoherent analogy. Because honestly, wouldn’t you rather read something that feels like it came from a real person, with real thoughts and real feelings, than something that sounds like it was assembled on a digital conveyor belt? I know I would.
As an example of how this is manifesting as a problem, I was listening the to the DOAC (diary of a CEO) podcast with Steven Bartlett and he was in conversation with Simon Sinek, and he was describing how he is becoming de-tuned to a style of content that has been even-part generated by AI, particularly where it is inconsistent with prior conversations, to the point where words that didn’t even exist in the vocabulary of friends were suddenly appearing in their comms. It was devaluing the content, and distracting from the message, where the distraction can be enough to have the message thrown away as the authenticity of the content was lost, and the message with it.
Being is Imperfect
So IMHO, be different, be wrong, relish the imperfections and take pride in having a voice and style that exists in the same space you do, as a human, it’s yours.
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