Don't Let AI Write Like Everyone Else
I am a big fan of using AI as a collaboration tool when writing. Claude and I spent about 20 hours writing and polishing the data strategy at my last company. I also used Claude to write and refine my failure management framework, which ChatGPT and I later spent a few hours editing and reworking. AI has become a critical part of how an increasing number of us write. If you aren't doing this, I highly recommend giving it a try.
Co-authoring with AI also has a downside. There has been a rise in a somewhat homogeneous writing style because authors are outsourcing their voice to AI instead of teaching the AI to write in their own voice. It's making what would otherwise be high-value content sound increasingly alike. You can see it in the syntax (the em dash. Ugh.), in the phrasing, and in the sentence structure. Contrastive phrasing and the constant push to end on a tagline are probably the most obvious examples. If we want our writing to have real impact, we need to fix this.
So here's my recommendation. Have your AI of choice interview you about your writing style and save the results as a Markdown document. You can share that document with other AI platforms and attach it to new projects as needed. I've found that both ChatGPT and Claude apply it fairly consistently from memory, although I occasionally have to remind them.
I think this matters for everyone, but even more for people in technical roles like ours.
- Will