Using AI without losing your voice
Why everything comes out sounding the same, and three habits that fix it.
You can spot AI-written work in seconds. The same keywords, the "in today's fast-paced world" openings, the phrases nobody uses out loud, the way every paragraph ends with a tidy little summary.
If you use AI on written work and don't fight back against that, your output starts to sound like everyone else's. You can use AI on writing without producing something that sounds like AI wrote it.
Why it all sounds the same
Large language models are trained on enormous amounts of writing, and the output averages across it. What comes back is a polished, neutral, mid-Atlantic business voice that nobody actually speaks in and everybody can read. It's competent. It's clean. It's also generic, and once you've noticed it you can't un-notice it.
That default is a starting point, not a destination. It is simply what you get when you don't specify anything else, which means most of the distance between generic and yours is closed by saying what you want.
Let it do this
First drafts of things you were always going to rewrite
Restructuring something you've already written
Tightening your own draft without adding to it
Summarising, reformatting, shifting register
Telling you which paragraph isn't earning its place
Do this yourself
The opening line
Anything carrying a strong opinion
The parts a client would quote back to you
Anything where the voice is the product
The final read, out loud, before it goes
Your voice is one of the few competitive things you have. Don't let a default style erase it because you couldn't be bothered to specify otherwise.
The edit is the part people skip
However carefully you set the prompt up, what comes back is a draft. Read every AI-assisted piece out loud before you send it. Actually out loud. If a sentence feels wrong in your mouth, it isn't a sentence you'd write, so rewrite it.
That five-minute pass is the whole difference between AI-assisted writing and AI-written writing. Do it consistently and something else follows: you start reaching for AI on specific jobs, restructuring, summarising, unsticking a paragraph, rather than on the whole piece. It becomes a tool inside your writing process instead of a replacement for it.
Three habits that keep it yours
None of this asks you to write differently. It asks you to give the model something of yours to work from, and to be specific about what you don't want. Keep one banned-words list and paste it into every creative prompt: leverage, robust, seamless, unlock, transform, revolutionise, in today's fast-paced world, in conclusion, it's worth noting, that being said, dive into, journey, ecosystem, navigate. No em-dashes. Add your own as you spot them.
If you haven't got writing to hand, dictate something into your phone and paste the transcript. It lands closer to your natural voice than anything you'd consciously write.
Three things to do this week
01
Show it your voice instead of describing it
Paste two or three things you've actually written. Examples move the output further than any adjective.
02
Keep a banned-words list in every creative prompt
Leverage, robust, seamless, unlock, transform, dive into, in today's fast-paced world. Add your own as you spot them.
03
Write the bad version first
A rough draft in your own words gives it something to sharpen, instead of a blank page to fill with its defaults.
Banned words list
Paste this at the end of any writing prompt. Don't use any of these phrases or words: leverage, robust, seamless, unlock, transform, revolutionise, in today's fast-paced world, in conclusion, it's worth noting, that being said, fast-paced, dive into, journey, ecosystem, navigate (as a verb meaning 'manage'). Don't use em-dashes. Add your own pet peeves to the list as you notice them.
Conclusion
01
AI writing all sounds the same because nobody fights back against the defaults.
02
Show it your voice, write the rough version yourself, and ban the giveaway phrases.
03
Do it consistently and you end up using AI less, on smaller parts of the work.
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