If you use AI and feel like you sound like everyone else, why should anyone trust you?
In general, I strongly dislike AI-generated content.
Not because it’s badly written, superficial, not-credible or amateurish.
Quite the contrary. It’s too good.
But it has no “feel”, no “character” or “emotion” that takes me in. It’s just too perfect, too polished, and too detached to make me feel like it is written from someone I could trust.
When I tried to use AI to improve or optimize what I had written, I got perplexed. Yes, it was better written, better structured, and more focused, but as I read and re-read it I could not recognize myself in it.
And if I cannot recognize someone, a specific character and tone, with all of its flaws and limitations in how he writes and communicates, why then read him/her, why follow her or buy his books? I may as well go to Youtube, ChatGPT or Claude and ask whatever I want to know.
So the question is: if I am not a natural-born writer and if I have written very little in my life to have had the opportunity to develop my own unique writing style, how do I develop one now?
Is it even possible?
(Writing) Style Emerges
Style, like taste, it’s not about the surface. It’s about depth and resolution.
One is flat, mono-dimensional, superficial. The other is multidimensional: the result of a human journey. It contains effort, exploration, emotions. And that’s exactly the difference between an AI-generated “voice” and your natural, personal writing voice.
Writing style is not made up of a set of grammatical variables that you can order, buy and attach to words.
Voice comes from your actual experience, not from the tools or the syntax you use.
It is not a dress that you like, buy and put on when you need it. It emerges from extended exposure and interaction with something specific. Not by forcing it or by asking AI.
You can teach AI to use your writing style once you have it, but not vice-versa.
Not because AI would refuse to do it, but because style, like taste, is something very personal that emerges from exposure and interaction.
So, what happens most of the time, is that you get better at whatever you’re trying to improve by following your mentors and models.
As you get better, you start literally copying and emulating from those that inspire you.
It’s only then that a uniquely recognizable style starts to emerge as you remix and push the boundaries of what you have made yours.
It doesn’t have to take years, but it does require extended direct engagement and exposure, even if for limited, short amounts of time.
Frequency and exposure are the key words here.
Why AI May Not Help Accelerate This Journey
In my experience - and I have been writing online since the year 2000 - exercising the muscle, day in and day out, is the way to go. Like in any sport or art, be it painting or boxing, you develop your style by practicing a lot.
You don’t become good by practicing tricks and shortcuts. Nor by using AI to generate something you do not have yet.
AI can replicate form but not the process and experience that generates that form.
AI can mimic patterns of your past text, but it hasn’t lived the process of your trial and error, your hesitations, your experiential filters. That’s why no matter how good your prompts are, it is hard for it to really sound the real you.
Your style isn’t just syntax; it’s choice under pressure: what you omit, what you linger on, what you can’t resist phrasing a certain way. AI can simulate, but it can’t really live inside your internal universe.
That’s why teaching AI your voice works only after you’ve built it. Otherwise, it’s like asking a chef to recreate the flavor of a dish you’ve never cooked.
Climber or Helicopter Tourist?
Check this metaphor I often use: you can go on top of the highest mountain personally, by physically climbing or you can pay a helicopter and be placed on its highest peak in a few minutes.
You may argue that the view from that peak is the same for both, no matter how you got there. But I dare disagree.
The view, perception, emotions and physiological state of who has made the physical effort to get there, is deeply different from the one who got there with a helicopter. The resolution and depth of the first, is a million times higher than the other one.
Here’s why.
The harder is the climb. The deeper is the view.
The view in geographic terms is the same. But the climber has had many hours to watch it as he was hiking, and has been noticing places and recognizing far locations that the helicopter tourist cannot even detect, unless someone tells him to.
The climber has a feel for the view. To him it is not just a panorama. It’s the result of an experience, while for the tourist, it is just a pretty sight to watch.
The climber, because of the journey, has a unique view that’s only his. No other climber - even if willing to - will be able to replicate it. Not so for the tourists. Each and everyone of them will see the exact same view.
Now imagine taking the climber and the tourist, putting them on the stage of a big theatre on Broadway and having them recount their experience (excluding the part on how they got there) to a curious audience.
What will the audience feel in those two reports?
Can you see the difference?
The difference is resolution.
By repeatedly going deeper the climber can see and feel stuff that is completely alien to the tourist field of view. It’s the consequence of a process.
Don’t Be Fooled
Remember: No matter what I say, if you ask, AI will do it.
AI will not warn you of these subtle but profound, initially invisible differences.
AI will generate content in any writing style that you dictate to it without flinching.
But what you will be generating is a photograph of a great painting. Not the painting itself.
AI writing pales when compared to the writing of someone whose style has emerged from his personal journey/work/process. It looks like a souvenir miniature of a Michelangelo sculpture you just bought at the Rome airport on the way home.
And it is not because we are still in the early days of AI… and soon it will get better. It is because style, like taste, emerges from a process. It cannot be generated on demand.
By asking AI to do our writing, before we have even developed our own writing style and “voice” we completely obliterate the reason and motive for which we have originally decided to have a personal writing style:
To be authentic
To be unique
To be recognizable
And once we have removed these, we are left only with the packaging, but without any real, true, personal style.
Writing More Is the Way
Our voice and writing style emerges exclusively from experience, interaction and exposure. Not by diktat.
You can’t fake it.
To develop our voice and style there’s no way around it.
We need to write.
It doesn’t matter the topic, the length or how we’re feeling.
What matters is frequent exposure and interaction.
The more, the better.
The more, the sooner your style will emerge.
Perfect AI writing is plastic.
Your voice is what builds trust.
*In the next issue, I am considering to look at how this process can be facilitated and sped up by using some specific techniques and approaches. If that interests you, please like, share or restack this article to signal your wish.
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From Koh Samui (TH)
Robin Good
I love this: "The harder is the climb. The deeper is the view." I fully agree with you. Well detailed and explained.