Hello Reader,
"I wanted to let you know we're ending our contract at the end of this month. Our CEO wants us to use AI to write the content instead."
Way too many of us have heard those words in the last couple of years, and they never get easier. They hurt, and if you're like me there's more than a little anger too. How can a client expect a machine to put the same care and attention into the work that we do?!
It's a case of good enough in their eyes, unfortunately.
AI can imitate a writer with unsettling accuracy. That's why the AI companies are feeding their models books at an unprecedented rate.
Give it enough examples and it can reproduce sentence length, rhythm, vocabulary, humor, and tone. It can even incorporate the little habits that once belonged entirely to that author.
Have you ever heard the phrase, "imitation is the sincerest form of flattery?" I don't think that counts when it comes to AI.
For a freelance writer, that ability to imitate can create a very specific kind of fear. If a tool can sound like us, what exactly is left for us to contribute? I think it's a fair question.
The pressure AI has introduced into the writing profession is sometimes overwhelming. We're not imagining the large numbers of clients who now see writing as something that can be generated in seconds. I don't think you need more hollow reassurances that AI will never replace "the human touch."
I think we need to start with a more useful understanding of voice.
Voice is not simply the recognizable "sound" of your sentences. AI can easily observe and reproduce that. Your voice begins earlier, with how you approach the work, what you pay attention to, and the choices you make as you turn an idea into a finished manuscript.
AI may be able to imitate you, my friend. But it can't replace you, and this month I'm going to talk about why. Let's start, shall we?
1. Your voice is not your verbal fingerprint
I find that writers often talk about voice as if it were a collection of recognizable characteristics.
Maybe you use long, winding sentences. Maybe your writing is brisk and direct. You might be known for dry humor, vivid analogies, unexpected questions, or the occasional sentence fragment. These patterns help readers recognize your work.
But they are evidence of a voice, not the voice itself.
Your voice is how you say something, sure. But it also includes why you chose to say that particular thing, to those particular people, in that particular way.
Two writers can use similar language while producing entirely different work because they make different decisions. They choose different details, organize the information differently, and place emphasis in different places. Even when they begin with the same subject, they do not necessarily see the same story.
Those choices happen long before tone or sentence structure enters the picture.
If we define voice only by its verbal fingerprints, AI's ability to reproduce those fingerprints feels like an existential threat. If we understand voice as the result of a larger creative process, imitation is a much smaller part of the picture.
2. When AI can imitate, move upstream
You might be tempted to make your writing even more distinctive by becoming more personal, more casual, or more idiosyncratic. But trying too hard to "sound human" can produce writing that feels surprisingly artificial. Don't let personality become decoration rather than an expression of genuine thought.
A better response is to move upstream.
Think about everything that happens before the writing. You interpret the assignment. You gather information. You decide which questions need to be answered and in what order. You identify what is useful, what is distracting, and what needs more evidence. You make choices about structure, pace, emphasis, and context.
Sometimes you realize the original brief is asking the wrong question. Sometimes the interview reveals a better story than the one you expected to write. Sometimes a beautifully written paragraph needs removed because it gets in the way.
These decisions may not be visible in the finished work, but that doesn't make them less valuable. Much of what makes writing good happens before anyone reads the finished piece.
Your voice grows stronger when your choices become more deliberate.
3. Let AI's imitation help you clarify your voice
Being imitated can be uncomfortable, but it can also be revealing.
Try giving an AI tool several samples of your writing and asking it to produce a new piece in your style. Then read the result closely.
Some parts may feel uncannily accurate. Others will sound like you at first but feel wrong.
Instead of looking only for incorrect vocabulary or awkward phrasing, ask deeper questions:
- Where did it oversimplify something I would have handled more carefully?
- Where did it become more "certain" than I would?
- What tension did it resolve too much?
- Which of my habits did it exaggerate?
- Where did the writing sound too polished?
- What would I never have written, even though it technically "sounds like me"?
- What important question did it never ask?
You're looking for the gap between "This sounds like me" and "I would never say this."
AI's imperfect imitation gives you an opportunity to see the less obvious parts of your voice.
4. Your voice is not one fixed setting
A real voice has range (where AI writing tends to be more one dimensional).
I bet you don't speak to a close friend in the same way you speak to a new client. You also wouldn't use the same tone in an emotional essay, a sales email, and a technical report. Those differences exist because you understand context.
AI imitation often creates writing using only the most visible characteristics. For instance, if your writing is usually warm, the imitation will be relentlessly warm. Or if you tend to use humor, it may try to add a joke in every paragraph (I've seen this and it's fricken annoying).
The results are often more caricature than voice. I know at a glance when someone is using AI to "ghostwrite." The results are painful and blah to the extreme.
Consistency, which is what you excel at, does not require sameness. Your voice can be playful in one piece and restrained in another. It can also be expansive when the subject needs exploration and direct when needed.
Your continuity is found in the quality of the choices behind your words.
Our work often requires us to move between subjects, audiences, and styles, which means range is part of our skill.
5. Freelance writers have always worked between voices
Freelance writers rarely have the luxury of writing in one unmistakable personal style because we are seldom writing for ourselves.
We adapt to publications, clients, audiences, formats, and subjects. We might write in the voice of a founder, a brand, or a subject-matter expert. That also means we are constantly learning new terminology, following editorial guidelines, and adjust our rhythms to suit the work.
In other words, we already know that voice is more complicated than sounding like ourselves all the time.
An AI tool might produce something that resembles the requested style, but resemblance isn't what we do.
We have to interpret what the client means, instead of what they say. AI is incredibly literal. Have you ever given it a prompt and then argued with it for an hour trying to get it to do a relatively simple thing? That is a direct example of doing what you say instead of what you mean.
When we work with clients, we identify contradictions, gaps, unsupported assumptions, and details the client might not see right away. We instinctively understand when following a voice guide too literally would make the writing sound like a caricature of the brand.
Professional voice is a consistent quality of attention applied across many different kinds of work.
6. Protect your authorship
When an LLM is "writing", it's generating a plausible sentence without making all of the decisions we have to make.
We, on the other hand read our paragraphs and take time to decide if each sentence belongs.
- Is it accurate?
- Does it fit the larger piece?
- Is it saying something important or is it filler?
- Does it reflect the source material?
- Has it introduced an assumption that no one intended to make?
- Would you be willing to put your name on it?
These questions are part of authorship.
Your voice does not need to be impossible to imitate
Perhaps the goal is not to make your voice so distinctive that no tool could reproduce it. That turns voice into a fortress we must constantly defend. It also gives AI's imitative ability more significance than it deserves.
Instead, we need to understand what produces your voice.
The next time you write something, pay attention to the choices you make before and during the writing. Note the questions you ask and the details you decide to include.
Your true voice, the one AI can never imitate or reproduce, is present in the way you participate in the work.
AI may be able to sound like you, but that is a far cry from authoring the work you would create.
Finding your voice is the beginning. Your ability to use that as an author becomes more valuable when you know what you think, use it in service of real people, and develop ideas others learn to associate with you.
We'll explore each of those steps in the next three newsletters.
And that's it for this week. Hope you have a wonderful weekend.
Treasa (and Trudy)
P.S. I'm running my next Content Strategy Bootcamp this month!. It's five, in-person (via Zoom) session that happen at 12 pm ET every day from August 17 to 21. If moving further upstream sounds like the right next step for your writing business, the five-session Content Strategy Bootcamp will help you understand how strategy differs from content planning, recognize where your existing skills already overlap, and decide whether content strategy services fit your business.
