Open any blog. Read the first paragraph. Then open another one. And another. Give it two minutes and you'll notice something unsettling — they all sound like the same person wrote them. The same rhythm. The same sentence structure. The same opening hook that begins with a question or a bold, slightly controversial claim. The same "here's what I learned" framing at the end.
It's not a coincidence. It's AI copy-paste culture at scale.
"In a world where everyone has access to the same tool, using it the same way is the most uncreative thing you can do."
The Voice That Belongs to No One
I was a journalist before I became a designer. I spent years learning how to find my voice — how to make an interview feel like a conversation, how to open a story that makes someone want to stay. Voice is everything. Voice is trust. Voice is the thing that makes a reader feel like there's an actual human on the other side of the page.
What I'm seeing now is the opposite of that. It's a borrowed voice. A composite. The statistical average of everything ever written, smoothed out into something that offends no one and says nothing real. You've seen it everywhere:
"Let's dive in." "Game-changer." "In today's fast-paced world..." "Here are the 7 things nobody tells you about..." "At the end of the day, it all comes down to one thing."
Scroll LinkedIn for five minutes. You'll collect the full set.
The YouTube Version Is Worse
At least bloggers occasionally have a sentence that surprises you. YouTube scripts have fully surrendered. The formula is so established at this point it's almost ritual: open with a hook disguised as vulnerability, tease three points, say "but first—" and cut to something unrelated, deliver each point with exactly the same cadence, close by asking viewers to subscribe and "let me know in the comments." The content could be about anything. Cooking, fitness, design, geopolitics — the container is identical.
What bothers me most isn't that people use AI. I use AI. Every day. I think it's one of the most powerful creative tools I've ever touched. What bothers me is the absence of editing. The lack of a single moment where someone looks at what was generated and asks: does this actually sound like me? Does this say something I believe?
A Former Journalist's Take
Here's the thing about writing: the friction is the point. The part where you can't find the right word, where you write a sentence and delete it, where you sit with an idea long enough that it changes shape — that's where the actual thinking happens. That's where a piece of writing becomes yours.
When you skip that friction entirely and publish the first clean output of a language model, you're not expressing an idea. You're laundering one. You're putting your name on something that has no fingerprints.
Readers feel it, even when they can't name it. There's a specific kind of flatness to AI-first writing — technically correct, structurally complete, emotionally absent. It reads like a summary of an article that was itself a summary. There's no texture. No specific detail that could only come from lived experience. No sentence that makes you think only this person would have said it this way.
What I Actually Want to Read
Something messy. Something with a wrong turn that the writer decided to keep because it was honest. An opinion that isn't softened at the end with "but of course, everyone has their own perspective." A specific memory. A detail that's almost too small to matter but that you notice immediately because nobody else would have included it.
I want to read things where I can feel the person behind it — not the algorithm, not the prompt, not the style transfer. The person. Their specific obsessions, their particular way of noticing things, the rhythm of how they actually think.
That's what writing is for. That's what it's always been for.
So next time you generate a draft — read it slowly. Then ask yourself: which sentence in here could only be mine?
Start there.