The AI Tone Has Made Everyone Sound the Same
I'm Tired of the AI Tone
The author is tired of the AI tone—not AI writing itself, but the recognizable sameness it creates. Every idea becomes a wedge, every paragraph gets an em dash, and every post ends with a neat inspirational bow. Suspicious words like unlock, leverage, and seamless have turned into corporate spam. AI optimizes away the imperfections that make writing human, and when everyone uses the same model, everyone converges on one polite, interchangeable Internet Voice. The fix: use AI, then put yourself back in.
AI is getting incredibly good at sounding intelligent. The competitive advantage now might be sounding human.
- JoshTriplett
> Have it rewrite your terrible first draft.
> Have it fix your grammar.
> Have it make your argument clearer.
> Have it turn your 2,000-word ramble into something people can actually read.
Please don't do this, and then try to "put some of yourself back into it".
By all means, use AI to find bugs. But don't let it write a single word. Let it tell you what's wrong, then you can fix it and iterate.
- ChrisMarshallNY
> Nobody talks like this in real life.
Marketing folks talked like that, for almost my entire career (it was basically a meme), which wound up, as AI was coming into its own.
- gizajob
If you’d have told me this breathless post. Talking about being tired about the AI tone.
Punctuated like this.
Was then AI tone…
Then I’d have believed you.
- zetanor
I don't use LLMs a whole lot, mostly for research, but personally I'm more bothered by the prompting than by the responses. After years of randomly receiving (now less frequent) incorrect answers, I've gotten used to preempting obvious but wrong trains of thought: "I need X. It's not Y." When I forget to do this and the reply is incorrect, sometimes I'm too lazy to reprompt, so I'll just write back "It's not Y" and it'll answer "wow omg you're so absolutely right, Y is not X!!! here's X instead."
This wasn't great, but then I started catching myself writing "It's not Y" responses to colleagues on Teams. I'm pretty sure I've caught all of these and never actually sent them (I did go and review a few chat logs recently and found no such sent message), but my point is that despite my relatively light LLM usage, I am "LLM-conditioned." The abyss stares back. There could be a lot of deeply "LLM-brained" people out there.
- brunohaid
One thing that works quite well for me for a couple of model generations now is to mention https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simplified_Technical_English, something along the lines of
**Use controlled technical English.** Prefer an ASD-STE100 style: use short sentences, direct terms, active voice, and one idea per sentence; avoid slang, hype, vague pronouns, and unnecessary jargon.
in your agents.md. The concept of STE100 seems sufficiently ingrained in the models to eliminate 90% of the annoying fluff.