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I'm tired of the AI tone

· 5 min read

I'm tired of the AI tone.

Not AI writing itself. AI is incredibly useful. I've probably used ChatGPT more this week than I'd like to admit.

I'm talking about the weird, increasingly recognizable way everything on the internet now sounds like it was written by the same extremely articulate 27-year-old who has never had a bad day.

You know the tone.

Everything is a wedge.

Every idea is not just X, but Y.

Every paragraph contains an em dash — like this — because apparently the comma has been deprecated.

Everything is "a powerful shift."

Something doesn't just solve a problem. It "unlocks a new way to think about the problem."

A product isn't useful. It "sits at the intersection of X and Y."

A company doesn't build something. It "reimagines how we..."

And every post somehow ends with:

The future is already here.

Thanks, Claude.

The AI vocabulary

There are certain words that have become suspicious.

"Wedge" is probably the biggest one.

Every startup now has a wedge.

"We're starting with X as our wedge into Y."

Nobody talks like this in real life.

I've been in startups for a long time. I've sat in hundreds of product meetings. I've talked to founders, engineers, customers, and investors.

I have almost never heard someone say:

«"This is our wedge."»

But put the same person in front of ChatGPT and suddenly they're building a "land-and-expand wedge into the enterprise."

Other suspicious words include:

  • unlock
  • leverage
  • ecosystem
  • paradigm
  • transformative
  • seamless
  • robust
  • thoughtfully
  • empower
  • foster
  • nuanced
  • landscape
  • intersection
  • fundamentally
  • increasingly
  • reimagine
  • accelerate
  • journey

None of these words are bad.

That's what makes it worse.

They're perfectly normal words that AI has managed to make feel like corporate spam.

And then there are the em dashes

Why are there so many fucking em dashes?

Seriously.

AI loves an em dash.

It uses them to connect thoughts that a normal human would separate into two sentences.

Or a comma.

Or just leave disconnected because humans don't actually write with perfect transitions all the time.

AI writing has this strange obsession with making every sentence flow beautifully into the next one.

Real people don't do that.

Sometimes we start a sentence badly.

Sometimes we use parentheses.

Sometimes we repeat ourselves.

Sometimes we say "and" four times.

Sometimes we write:

«"I don't know. Maybe I'm wrong."»

And move on.

That's writing.

The perfect structure

AI also loves structure.

You can usually recognize an AI-generated post from about 50 feet away.

It starts with a provocative sentence.

Then:

Here's the thing:

Then three or five perfectly balanced points.

Then a counterargument.

Then a thoughtful conclusion.

Then a sentence about how "this isn't about X. It's about Y."

Then the inspirational ending.

It's like every LinkedIn post has gone through the same screenwriting course.

And God forbid you make a list.

AI will give you exactly five bullets.

Not four.

Not six.

Five.

Because five feels comprehensive.

The fake vulnerability

My favorite is the AI version of vulnerability.

"I used to think X.

I was wrong.

After spending years working on Y, I've come to realize Z."

That's not how people talk.

That's how a machine imagines someone talks after analyzing 40,000 LinkedIn posts.

Real vulnerability is messier.

"I completely screwed this up."

"I thought this was going to work. It didn't."

"I don't really know what I'm doing here."

"I changed my mind."

"I have no idea if this is right."

Those sentences are interesting because they're actually human.

The problem isn't that AI writes well

Ironically, the writing is often technically better.

That's the problem.

AI removes all the little imperfections that tell you a human wrote something.

The weird phrasing.

The unnecessary joke.

The sentence that goes on too long.

The opinion that doesn't quite fit the rest of the argument.

The typo.

The "I don't know how to explain this, but..."

Those things give writing a personality.

AI optimizes them away.

And when everyone uses the same model, everyone optimizes toward the same mean.

We are slowly converging on one universal Internet Voice™.

Polite.

Clear.

Structured.

Nuanced.

Optimistic.

Slightly corporate.

Occasionally profound.

And completely fucking interchangeable.

Please sound like yourself

I'm not arguing that we should stop using AI to write.

Quite the opposite.

Use it.

Have it rewrite your terrible first draft.

Have it fix your grammar.

Have it make your argument clearer.

Have it turn your 2,000-word ramble into something people can actually read.

But then put some of yourself back into it.

Delete the em dashes.

Remove "unlock."

Kill the "not X, but Y."

Delete "wedge" unless you are actually talking about a wedge.

Say what you mean.

Use shorter sentences.

Have an opinion.

Be slightly weird.

Don't make every paragraph perfectly symmetrical.

And for the love of God, occasionally write a sentence that sounds like something you would actually say out loud.

AI is getting incredibly good at sounding intelligent.

The competitive advantage now might be sounding human.

Post draft is ready, do you want me to make it shorter?