The Real Tell of AI Writing: Your Voice

There’s been much chatter lately about the “tells” of AI writing. The cliché words and phrases. The tidy triads. The “it’s not this, it’s that” and the staccato single-sentence paragraphs. They’re ubiquitous now. But they’re symptoms of the real problem: letting AI replace your voice.

When you know how someone writes, you develop a subconscious internal ear for it. You instinctively recognize the rhythm of their sentences, the vocabulary they tend to use, how formal or informal they are, and how they structure an argument. Over time those patterns become like a fingerprint.

So when an email or post arrives that scans as strangely polished, oddly generic, or just somehow off versus the person you know, it jumps out immediately. Because it doesn’t sound like them.

This happened to me last year when someone emailed me about a consulting proposal. I immediately knew the message had been written by Claude. How? Because the structure didn’t match their normal communication style. The vocabulary was off. They hadn’t even bothered to strip the font before pasting it into the email.

Plenty of people use AI to help draft emails and posts. It can be an incredibly useful writing partner. The danger is when the authentic voice of the person using it disappears. When the writing clearly isn’t theirs, readers start to question whether the thinking behind it is. And once that doubt sets in, credibility is hard to recover.

So by all means, use AI to draft, to edit, to sharpen your thinking. But the last step still matters: edit the output until it sounds like you. Because the people who know your voice will definitely notice when it doesn’t.

Photo by George Prentzas on Unsplash