by : Mary Diaz, Entrepreneur, Writer, femme feral LLC
Since ChatGPT launched, I’ve noticed something strange happening to business messaging. Everyone’s producing more content than ever, and it all sounds… polished, professional, on-brand, and… eerily the same. As someone who’s spent the last decade helping entrepreneurs find that golden thread that only they can say, it feels a lot like in these early days of AI, we’re optimizing for perfect and losing what’s actually human.
This isn’t an argument against AI! It’s more of a “with great power comes great responsibility” plea. It’s an argument for retaining the imperfect unfurling of your actual voice, the one no prompt can just replicate.
The Polishing Problem
Most business leaders don’t struggle to get words on the page anymore. With tools like ChatGPT, clear, grammatically sound messaging is just a few prompts away. But voice gets lost in the process. The subtle, essential, emotional fingerprint that lets an audience feel you as they read.
I can usually tell within the first paragraph if someone used AI to write their content. Not because it’s bad writing! It’s often technically *chefs kiss.* But there’s something missing. Its soul? An Oxford comma? Or at least that messy humanity that makes you want to keep reading.
Uncultivated content generation creates a real disembodied disconnect. Readers might understand what you do, but they don’t feel connected to who you are. And in competitive markets, connection builds trust.
The Rise of Rhetorical Sameness
Large language models like ChatGPT are trained on billions of words across blogs, corporate websites, and marketing copy. They produce a voice that is grammatically precise, rhetorically structured, and technically polished. But that polish tends to create a homogenized cadence. How most people naturally speak or write gets lost.
There’s a fine-tuned symmetry to it all. The transitions are so neat, the phrases balanced, it’s an uncanny rhythm that mimics traditional rhetorical forms. While it can be pleasant to read, it often lacks the texture of genuine thought.
You see the signs everywhere: familiar patterns like contrasting statements (it’s not X, it’s Y!) , posing a question and immediately answering it, and those dependable listicles. These classical rhetorical devices aren’t inherently wrong. Aristotle collected and named many of them for good reason. They work well to intelligently construct human arguments and persuasion. But also, most of us don’t write like linguists.
We gesture, meander, add too many words… fumble… contradict ourselves. Creatives tend to think aloud on the page, follow tangents, and draw connections that don’t cleanly resolve. This is exciting! This is how real thought becomes legible and coherent.
When you overwrite all that with too much polish, you lose the feelable essence infused in your message. And that essence is kind of what it’s all about.
Takeaways for Creative Professionals and Thought Leaders
- Before you draft your next piece of content, try setting a timer and writing without AI for at least 20 minutes. Let your thoughts come out raw, emotional, and unfiltered.
- Revisit your past materials: course transcripts, coaching sessions, and interviews. Notice the language that shows up naturally. These are often your most resonant phrases.
- Document your recurring metaphors, your emotional beats, and how you connect ideas. Use these to build a voice lexicon that can guide your messaging going forward.
- Once you have a clear handle on your natural style, then bring in AI as a support tool to enhance, not overwrite, your expression.
- If needed, hire a strategic messaging partner who can help you identify and preserve the nuances of your voice so you can effectively scale (yes, with ai!) without losing the juicy bits.
Just remember, the goal isn’t flawless copy. The goal is emergent, precisely articulated thinking that couldn’t have come from anyone else.