Nearly everyone writing online at the moment is using AI to help do it. Which is fine, I do it too, and I’d be a bit of a fraud if I wrote an article about my AI agents and then pretended I’d typed every word of it out by hand.
But it’s all starting to sound the same. It reads the same and it sounds like the same author, whoever’s name happens to be at the top of it. You can scroll a long way through a feed now before you hit a sentence that could only have come from one particular person.
My contrarian take is that AI is an incredible enhancement tool but being authentically you is the only way to stand out in a world where everyone uses it.
What Actually Gives AI Writing Away
Most people think it’s the vocabulary. There’s a list of tell-tale words doing the rounds and everybody can spot them at 20 paces now. So the assumption is that if you strip those out, you’re safe.
You’re not. I’ve read plenty of drafts that broke none of those rules and still read like a machine had written them, and it took me a long time to work out why.
It’s the shape of the thing rather than the words in it. Once you know what to look for you can’t unsee it.
Every paragraph running to about the same length as the one before it.
Sections that all land neatly on a closing line summing up what you just read.
The clever little inversion, where an obvious answer gets set up and then knocked down.
A sentence left hanging for effect, because at some point somebody decided a fragment sounds punchy, and now every second post on the internet has one sitting in it doing absolutely nothing.
None of that is wrong on its own. The trouble is that when every piece of writing in front of you does all of it, none of it does anything for you.
The BBQ Test I Write Against
I speak about AI for a living. So most of my time goes on explaining technical things to people who don’t work in technology. Business owners, boards, rooms full of people who turned up for the coffee and stayed because somebody finally made it make sense.
So I keep the language simple. Not because I’m talking down to anyone, but because when you’re explaining this stuff to someone who doesn’t understand it yet, they shouldn’t have to decipher the sentence as well in order to get it. Every bit of effort they spend on your writing is effort they’re not spending on your idea.
The way I put it to my team is that I want people to feel like it’s me just chatting to them at a BBQ and not like they’re sitting in a uni lecture. That doesn’t mean dumbing anything down. The occasional quip or bit of proper vocabulary still sneaks in, partly to show that I do in fact know what I’m talking about. I’ll usually follow it with an analogy so nobody gets left behind.
Being Authentic Doesn’t Mean Being Perfect
Being authentic also doesn’t mean being grammatically correct every single time. If 1 or 2 spelling mistakes or bits of clumsy grammar slip through, that reads more human than the alternative. And the alternative is copy so clean it could only have come from something that never gets tired.
What you should never do is put them in on purpose. There are people seeding deliberate typos into their posts now to make them look hand written. You can spot it a mile off. A real mistake and a decorative one don’t sit in the same places.
My Own Back Catalogue Is Part of This
A fair bit of what’s already on this site was tidied up by AI. This would be a strange article to write without saying so. Some of the older pieces went through a model on their way to being published. Reading them back now, they don’t really sound like me. They’re not wrong. They’re just flat.
I’m leaving them up and I’m not going to rewrite them. They were honest attempts at the time. But saying it out loud is the point, because if I quietly left them sitting there and then told you to go and be authentic, you’d be entitled to ignore me.
I still use AI to write. The difference is that it’s in my voice now, and in the past it just felt inauthentic.
How I Got an Agent to Sound Like Me
The writing on this site comes out of an agent I’ve spent months training, including this article. Trained is probably the wrong word for what happened. What actually happened is that I read every draft it gave me and sent most of them back with the reasons written out.
What I learned doing that is that a voice isn’t a word list. Every time something came back that didn’t sound like me, the useful part was the reason rather than the word. And the reasons turned out to be things I could never have told you about my own writing beforehand. Keep the contractions in. Let one sentence in every 10 run long, because that’s my rhythm. Never finish a section by echoing the line it opened with.
The best test I’ve found takes about 5 seconds. Take the line you’re proudest of and say it out loud, the way you’d say it to somebody standing in front of you. If the plainer version means the same thing, the plainer version is yours and the clever one belongs to the machine.
It’s a brutal test to run on your own writing. The lines you like the most are usually the first ones to go.
This Is a Brand Problem More Than a Writing One
I put a lot of emphasis on getting this right, and the reason is that it’s as much a brand exercise as it is a writing brief.
If I nail an authentic sounding writing style, then I stand out from every other AI content creator as the one that people feel good reading. That’s the whole advantage, and it’s sitting there for anybody willing to sound like themselves.
It works the other way round too. When every business in your category is putting out the same competent, tidy, forgettable content, sounding like an actual human being stops being a nice touch. It turns into the only thing anyone remembers about you.
What I’d Do If You’re Using AI to Write
Don’t stop. Just stop handing it a blank page.
Give it your own words first. A voice note from the car, a bad first draft, the way you actually explained the thing to a client last week. These models are very good at tidying up something that already exists and very bad at inventing a personality from nothing. So hand over the personality and let it do the tidying.
Then read what comes back out loud. If it doesn’t sound like you, it isn’t finished, however clean it looks.
And leave the bits that are slightly wrong. The sentence that runs a bit too long, the joke that only half works, the word you always use that nobody else does. That’s the part that’s worth something. It’s the only part of the whole thing nobody else could have produced.
Go and read the last thing you published under your own name. If you took your name off the top and put a competitor’s there instead, would anyone notice? That’s the only writing test I still care about.