There’s a swelling chorus against AI-generated content on LinkedIn and elsewhere. As Oxide Computing CTO Bryan Cantrill opines, “Holy hell, the [AI] writing sucks.” Now, Cantrill is known for having strong opinions, but he’s not wrong when he argues this AI-generated writing is “stylistically grating.” The biggest tell? “Em-dashes that some of us use naturally—but most don’t (or shouldn’t).” OpenAI founder Sam Altman just fixed this last annoyance, but not before many of us realized that in our attempts to make our lives easier through AI, we inadvertently made everyone else’s lives worse.
It’s time to get back to writing that expresses ourselves, not merely what an LLM thinks sounds plausibly close to ourselves, because it’s the human in us that makes our communication compelling to other humans.
Cozying up to the robot voice
This trend toward robot voice isn’t new. If you’ve ever visited the UK or simply read a UK paper online, you’ll know that UK newspapers have distinctive voices. It’s not merely that different papers have different political biases and wear these biases proudly (or sanctimoniously, in the case of The Guardian) on their sleeves. Rather, they’re emphatically opinionated. In the US, we try to pretend we’re taking a neutral stance, even if the facts we choose to ignore or skew reveal our political biases quite clearly. As Emily Bell writes, “British journalism is faster, sloppier, wittier, less well-resourced and more venal, competitive, direct, and blunt than much of the US oeuvre.” (Yes, you know it’s an article from The Guardian when “oeuvre” is casually used as if normal people talk like that.)
