I got a LinkedIn message yesterday from a guy named “Steve” that was so obviously written by ChatGPT it made my teeth ache. It had that specific, oily sheen of fake politeness. You know the one. It used the word “delve.” It told me he hoped this message found me well. It was perfectly punctuated, grammatically flawless, and I deleted it in roughly 0.4 seconds without a second thought. Steve probably thinks he’s being efficient. He thinks he’s “scaling his outreach.” In reality, Steve is just becoming part of the furniture. He’s the acoustic foam on the wall—there, but totally ignored.
We are currently sprinting toward a future where every brand sounds like a lukewarm bowl of oatmeal. It’s safe. It’s consistent. And it is incredibly boring. I’ve spent the last decade working in operations and general management, and I’ve seen this happen before with different tech, but the AI wave is different. It’s faster. It’s making everyone invisible at a record pace.
The efficiency trap that nobody wants to admit
Everyone is obsessed with “saving time.” We’ve been told that if we can automate the 80% of our communication that is repetitive, we can focus on the 20% that matters. That sounds great in a boardroom. It looks amazing on a slide deck. But in practice, what actually happens is that the 80% becomes so robotic that it poisons the other 20%.
I’ll be honest: I used to think that scaling was the only thing that mattered. I was completely wrong. Scaling is usually just a way to ruin something that was actually good. I remember back in 2018, I tried to automate the onboarding emails for a small logistics firm I was helping out. I spent weeks setting up these perfect triggers. The result? Our response rate dropped by half. People don’t want a “perfectly timed touchpoint.” They want to know there’s a human on the other end who isn’t just clicking ‘generate.’
Over-automation isn’t a shortcut to growth; it’s a shortcut to being forgotten.
When you use AI to write your brand voice, you aren’t just saving time. You are outsourcing your personality. And personality is the only reason people choose you over the cheaper option on Amazon. If you sound like a bot, I’m going to treat you like a bot. That means I’ll drop you the second a cheaper bot comes along.
I tested 22 brands and the results were depressing
I actually sat down last Tuesday—when I definitely should have been finishing a quarterly report—and emailed 22 different D2C brands with a slightly complex question about their return policies. I wasn’t being a jerk; I just wanted to see who was home. I tracked the responses in a spreadsheet.
- 19 out of 22 used the exact same opening sentence structure.
- 14 of them used the phrase “I understand how frustrating this can be” (the classic AI empathy move).
- Only 2 responses felt like they were written by someone who had actually read my specific question about the 4mm difference in tread depth I was worried about.
The worst offender was a high-end outdoor gear company I won’t name (okay, it rhymes with Schm-atagonia, but it wasn’t them—it was a smaller competitor). Their response was a masterpiece of AI-generated fluff. Three paragraphs of text that essentially said “No.” It took me longer to read their polite AI garbage than it would have taken to read a one-sentence “Sorry, we can’t do that” from a real person.
What I mean is—actually, let me put it differently. We’ve reached a point where “professionalism” is just a synonym for “robotic.” I hate it. I genuinely hate it. I’d rather get a reply with a typo from a guy named Mike who clearly just stepped away from a warehouse pallet than a pristine, multi-paragraph essay from a GPT-4 wrapper.
The part where I tell you something you won’t like
I might be wrong about this, but I think typos are actually good for business now. I know, I know. Your English teacher is screaming. But in a world of AI perfection, a small mistake is a proof-of-life certificate. It says, “A human touched this.”
I have this weird, irrational loyalty to a tiny coffee roaster in Maine. Their website is a mess. The descriptions are sometimes just one sentence like “This one tastes like a campfire in a good way.” It’s unprofessional. It’s messy. And I’ve spent over $800 with them in the last two years. Why? Because I know exactly who they are. They don’t have a “brand voice strategy.” They just have a voice.
Using AI for your brand voice is like trying to give a hug while wearing a hazmat suit. There’s no warmth. There’s no connection. You’re just two pieces of plastic bumping into each other. (That was a bit much, but you get what I mean.)
Anyway, I digress. The point is that we’re all so scared of looking “unprofessional” or “unpolished” that we’re scrubbing away everything that makes us interesting. If your brand sounds like everyone else, you don’t have a brand. You have a commodity. And commodities compete on price until they die.
Stop trying to be perfect
I refuse to use Grammarly’s “tone suggestions.” I tried it once for a month and it kept telling me I sounded “too direct.” It wanted me to add all these cushioning words. Total lie. Being direct isn’t the problem. Being fake is the problem.
If you’re running a business or a blog or a side project, please, for the love of everything holy, stop asking the bot to “make this sound more professional.” It’s making you sound like a corporate brochure from 1994.
Here is my very short, very blunt recommendation for not being invisible:
- Write like you talk to your friends after two beers.
- If the AI suggests a word you wouldn’t say out loud, delete it.
- Leave in one weird opinion that might annoy some people.
- Stop worrying about “scaling” your personality.
It’s scary to be weird. It’s scary to have a voice that isn’t perfectly smoothed over by an algorithm. But the alternative is being a beige hallway. Nobody remembers a beige hallway. They just walk through it to get somewhere else.
I don’t know if this trend will ever reverse. Maybe in five years, we’ll all just have our personal AI agents talking to brand AI agents and no humans will ever communicate again. I hope not. That sounds exhausting.
Go write something that would make a corporate lawyer flinch.
