You can always tell, can't you. The em-dashes everywhere. "In today's fast-paced world." "It's not just X — it's Y." That faintly plastic, eager-to-please voice. If you've ever read something AI wrote and thought "this sounds like nobody," — this post is the fix.
🪞 Why it sounds like that
Out of the box, it writes for everyone — which means it writes like no one. It defaults to the safe, average, faintly corporate middle, because that's the average of everything it ever learned from. Left to its own devices, it'll make your business sound like every other business.
🎯 Give it your voice to copy
The single best trick: show it how you actually sound. Paste in two or three things you've genuinely written — an email, a post, a scrappy note — and say "write this in the same voice as these." It's a mimic. The fix is to give it something worth mimicking.
🚫 Ban the tells
Be blunt about what you can't stand. Something like: "No em-dashes. No 'in today's world'. No 'it's not just… it's…'. Don't open with 'I'd be happy to'. Write like a real person talking to one other person." Keep your own little hit-list and paste it in whenever it matters.
✂️ Shorter and plainer
Nine times out of ten, "make it half the length" fixes the AI-ness on its own. The bloat is the tell. Also reliable: "use shorter sentences," "cut the adjectives," "say it the way you'd say it out loud."
🧊 Read it cold before you send
The last 10% is you. Read it back as if a stranger sent it to you. The bits that make you wince — the too-keen opener, the tidy little summary bolted on the end — delete them. What's left sounds like you, because you just made the human edits only you can make.
The goal was never to have AI write for you. It's to get a fast first draft and then put your fingerprints all over it. That's the whole difference between content that sounds like everyone, and writing that sounds like you.