Writing With AI Without Sounding Like Everyone Else

There is a particular texture to text that a model wrote and a human lightly edited. Balanced sentences, no strong claims, a preference for listing considerations over choosing between them, and a closing paragraph that summarises without adding. Readers recognise it now, and the recognition is not neutral: it reads as an absence of someone at home.

What actually gives writing away

• Symmetry. Every point balanced by a counterpoint, every claim softened. Real arguments are lopsided because the writer believes something.
• Generic examples. "A company might implement a solution" instead of a specific thing that happened on a specific Tuesday.
• Even rhythm. Sentences of similar length in similar shapes. Human prose varies wildly, and the variation is where emphasis lives.
• No cost. Nothing risked, nobody disagreed with, no admission that the writer was wrong about this two years ago.

Keep the judgement, delegate the rest

The division that works is simple to state and requires discipline to hold: the tool can help with everything except what you think. Research, structure suggestions, alternative phrasings, tightening a paragraph you already wrote, catching a repeated word, and reformatting for a different channel are all reasonable uses. Deciding the argument, choosing the examples, and writing the sentences that carry the point are not.

The moment you accept a generated paragraph that expresses a view you had not already formed, the piece stops being yours in the way that matters, and readers notice a page later even if they cannot name why.

Specificity is the defence

The most reliable way to sound like a person is to include things only you could know. The number your test actually returned. The colleague who disagreed and turned out to be right. The version of the tool you were on when it broke. Generated text tends toward the general because the general is safer, and the general is exactly what nobody needs another copy of.

Write the sentence that could get you an angry reply. That is usually the sentence the piece exists for.

A workflow that keeps the voice

1. Write the argument in your own words first, badly, in five minutes. This fixes the position before any tool can influence it.
2. Draft from that outline yourself, keeping the ugly sentences.
3. Use the tool for structural feedback: what is unclear, what is missing, where a reader would object.
4. Do the final line editing by hand, out loud. This is where voice survives or dies.

The output is slower than fully generated text and considerably faster than writing alone, and it retains the one property that makes anyone read a person rather than a search result.