Your Voice is Power
Your voice has the power to move people to action. Don’t let AI write you out of your own story.
AI has made it easier than ever to write something that sounds ultra professional. Polished and agreeable. That may be a bigger problem than we realize.
Open LinkedIn, scroll through a few newsletters, or visit a handful of company websites and you’ll start to see a certain amount of sameness. Everything is technically fine, but it’s all a little too … bland. The law of averages strikes again.
It’s a stark distance from the Mad Men era, when we were first taught to “find our voice.” Stephen Covey built an entire book around the idea in 2004 with The 8th Habit. But perhaps artist and author Austin Kleon said it best in his 2014 book Show Your Work!: “The only eveway to find your voice is to use it.”
With the dawn of generative AI, a remarkable number of people have stopped finding their voice and are instead giving it away. That’s a real tragedy.
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The Story is the Product
Imagine a world where the Soggy Dollar Bar turned to AI and said, “Name this drink,” and AI replied, “Sounds like a piña colada to me.” Meh. Just another rum, pineapple, and cream drink.
Instead, the Painkiller became a legend. It was born in the 1970s at a tiny beach bar with no dock, where customers swam ashore and paid with soggy dollars. Two sets of owners still claim they invented the drink. A rum company later trademarked the name and sent lawyers after bars that mixed it with anyone else’s rum. And yet people still travel thousands of miles to that little bar for the “original.” Not for the recipe, which is almost beside the point. They come for the story, one that started some half century ago and still sparks conversation today.
Similarly, your customers want to know about your expertise, experiences, opinions, stories, values, quirks, and way of seeing the world. These elements are not grammatical errors. They’re not nuisances for AI to erase as it drives you to the middle of the road. Your experiences, your point of view, your voice: that’s your competitive advantage.
Which means AI should help you communicate your stories more effectively, not churn out a few paragraphs that completely erase who you are.
Writing is Hard
There’s an understandable reason people fall into bad content habits. Writing is hard. Staring at a blank page is hard. Figuring out what to say every week is hard. Finding the right words to both entertain and convert is especially hard.
AI offers an incredibly tempting alternative: “Write me a LinkedIn post about leadership.” Thirty seconds later, you have 500 perfectly well-constructed words.
Unfortunately, your top three competitors have probably generated the exact same post. Social media platforms (and global governing bodies) are catching on. Empty words are littering the internet, and the knee-jerk reaction is to watermark it all or slap on a label that says “AI wrote this.”
But the problem isn’t that AI wrote it. The problem starts when you allow AI to erase you from the output.
Your audience doesn’t need another generic explanation of how a certain tool or method will transform their business. When people buy, they usually don’t need to be convinced to make the purchase. They need to understand why to buy from you.
That means they need to hear about the client who changed the way you work. The life experience that drove you to your chosen field. The things you’ve learned through the school of hard knocks, and the things that came easy when you’re not really sure why. That’s the content worth reading, which makes it the content worth spending a little more time on.
The problem isn’t that AI wrote the content. The problem starts when you allow AI to erase your voice from its outputs.
– Monica Poling
More Isn’t Always More
One of the great myths of modern marketing is that more is more. For years, even before we’d ever heard of AI, the solution was to publish more. Blog more. Post more. Email more. Feed the algorithm. Chase the viral hit.
Then AI put that strategy on steroids. Suddenly the cost of producing one more post dropped to almost nothing, and AI pundits started celebrating volume as the very benefit AI brings.
But more has a cost. Because the internet (and your clients) do not need another thousand words on any topic simply because you can generate those words before lunch. Your customers need useful ideas, clear explanations, stories they remember, opinions backed by experience, and answers to questions they haven’t even fully formulated yet.
They need a beacon.
AI can help you outline and even articulate that beacon, but it cannot manufacture the lived experience underneath it. That must come from you.
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Your Voice Starts With Action
Finding your voice starts with defining the actions you consistently take, from the things you notice to the solutions you provide.
When people hear “brand voice,” they often think about adjectives: warm, professional, approachable, clever, authoritative, trustworthy. But the best brands are built on verbs, not adjectives. Just Do It. …Gives You Wings. Let’s Go Places. Challenge Everything.
The difference is your lived experience. Anyone can call themselves trustworthy, but without backup, the words have no real meaning. They’re the equivalent of a wink, wink.
That’s also why telling an AI tool to “write in a warm, conversational voice” will never be enough, no matter how “super intelligent” it becomes. Warm and conversational describes thousands of people. It doesn’t articulate what you bring to the table.
➤ Read More: One-size-fits-all messaging weakens your market position. Start delivering the right message to the right audience with an Audience Value Matrix.
AI Should Learn From You, Not just Create a “Voice”
This is where businesses get AI backwards. We keep asking, “How can I get AI to sound more like me?” That’s an okay starting point. But a better question is, “How can AI help me capture and showcase more of who i am?”
AI has expanded enormously over the past three years, and this is where most casual users haven’t caught up yet. You can now feed AI your raw material: your presentations, emails, sales conversations, meeting notes, customer questions, articles, voice memos, workshop transcripts, stories, opinions, frameworks, examples, and the things you explain over and over. Build a content knowledge base, and link to the articles and pieces that best reflect what makes you uniquely you.
Those materials become far more valuable than a 500-word prompt telling AI to “sound authentic,” because now the system has something real to work with. Once you’ve fed AI your material, you can ask it to organize your thinking, find recurring themes, turn a rambling voice memo into a first draft, explain an idea more clearly, repurpose a presentation into an article, challenge an argument, find gaps, or shorten something that wandered too far.
Those are great uses of AI. And notice what they all have in common: you supplied the thinking and the original source material. AI just helped you organize your own patterns.
Six Ways to Keep Your Voice When Using AI
You don’t need an elaborate brand-voice system to start defining your voice.
- Build an editorial guidelines file. This is a text file connected to your AI that defines what you want your voice to sound like. (Many AI tools let you save this file as a custom instruction, a project file, or a skill.) Do you want to be fire and brimstone? Do you want a soft, caring resonance? Add this to the file instructions.
- Record yourself talking. If writing makes you freeze up, explain your ideas out loud first. Your natural phrasing, examples, and emphasis often carry more personality than anything you might type into a prompt. Most major AI platforms can now even “interview” you to build voice suggestions for you.
- Give AI source material. Tell your AI what you like. Give it samples of your writing, transcripts, presentations, stories, and examples so it can work from something real. Most importantly, give it your real wins and client conversations. You can also give the AI links to other leaders or writing you admire.
- Create an outline (with your ideas) before asking for a draft. A messy outline that begins with “I believe these five things to be true” gives AI more direction than “write a post about leadership.”
- Create a Yuck Section. When you read somseone else’s blog and find yourself hating on something in their material, tell your AI what you noticed and why. When writing your own materials do the same. If AI hands you a phrase that sounds vaguely or unimpressive, tell it to strike that phrase from its vocabulary.
- Keep the final edit human. Before publishing anything, read the piece and ask: Is this what I believe? Is this what I sound like? Is anything in here only because AI suggested it? Those three questions will improve most AI-assisted content immediately. Sometimes AI will surprise you with a particularly clever insight. That’s fine. Keep it, as long as it’s something you’d stand behind.
Defining Your Voice Isn’t Just for Content Creators
Building a “voice” isn’t a task that’s strictly reserved for content creators. In fact, the more technical your business, the more important your voice becomes.
Content creators already know that how they sound drives conversions. Technical companies often think their work speaks for itself. But how you talk about your work is deeply important to the sales process. No matter what you do, you need to define how you want to sound.
What you’re creating matters, but so does putting a recognizable human being behind the work. Your purpose and your point of view are what make other people lean forward.
➤ Read More: Not all AI trainings are built the same. Click here to learn What to Look for in AI Training: the questions to ask, the red flags to avoid, and which curriculum is worth paying for.
Your Voice is Power
People don’t buy from you because you posted the most. They buy from you because you posted what was most relevant to them: to how they feel, the challenges they have, and the goals they’re pursuing.
So ask yourself: what do you know that makes people want to connect with you. What have you experienced? What do you believe? What patterns are you seeing? And what can people learn from you that they can’t get by typing the same question into ChatGPT themselves?
Don’t let your race to get things done result in giving away the voice your competitors, and AI, can never duplicate.
The One Question to Ask Every Time
The next time you see a headline claiming an AI “wanted” something, “decided” something, or “went rogue,” ask this: If I turn off the credit cards, the APIs, the tokens, and the data centers, will my AI still produce?
Today’s AI cannot escape that chain of human choices. When something goes wrong, stop asking what the AI was thinking. Ask who gave it the keys, who paid the bill, and who ignored the cracks in the foundation.
TL;DR: Your Voice is Power
AI can make anyone sound polished, which is exactly why polished isn’t enough anymore. Your stories, experience, and point of view are your competitive advantage. Use AI to capture and organize them, not erase them.
Key Takeaways
- Why does so much AI content sound the same? AI pulls writing toward the middle of the road. It produces polished, agreeable content that’s technically fine but nearly identical to what your competitors are publishing.
- Your story is the product. Customers choose you for your expertise, experiences, opinions, and point of view. The Painkiller cocktail is still famous half a century after it was created. Not because of its ingredients, but because of the story..
- More content isn’t the only goal. AI has made volume cheap, but customers don’t buy from whoever posts the most. They buy from whoever posts what’s most relevant to their challenges and goals.
- Brand voice is built on verbs, not adjectives. “Warm and conversational” describes thousands of businesses. Your voice comes from the actions you consistently take and the lived experience behind them.
- How should businesses use AI to keep their voice? Feed AI your own raw material, such as presentations, transcripts, client stories, and voice memos, and use it to organize and sharpen your thinking instead of inventing a voice for you.
- Keep the final edit human. Before publishing, ask: Is this what I believe? Is this what I sound like? Is anything in here only because AI suggested it?
Sources
The DSE Wiki incident
- Reuters: OpenAI agents hijacked German website in previously undisclosed AI breakout
- Sydney Von Arx, Cormac Slade Byrd, Spencer Kitts and Thomas Larsen: Discovery of a new OpenAI agent message board
- AI Incident Database: DSEWiki, Incident 1668
- XenoSpectrum: AI Agents Possibly Tied to OpenAI Left 14,591 Saved Edits on a Public Wiki
The Navier–Stokes agent run and its cost
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