Last month, a client booked one of his team members into our business writing workshop. Why? Because the guy (let’s call him Sylvester) had started using AI to write his emails, presentations and reports.
And at first, it looked like a win.
The spelling mistakes disappeared. The rambling paragraphs tightened up. Basically, all the obvious problems vanished with the flick of an AI-powered wand.
But something else disappeared, too.
Sylvester’s writing no longer sounded like Sylvester. It was clean, competent – and completely hollow. Like he’d had a lobotomy overnight.
He’d found a tool that made his writing look ‘better’ on first read. But it sucked the soul out of it, too.
Why your writing sounds like no one and everyone at the same time
Here’s what’s happening when Sylvester writes with AI. (And why the results feel weirdly generic.)
Good writing carries fingerprints. An abrupt sentence, because that’s how you talk. A strange analogy you’ve been using since childhood. Little quirks that make the writing feel unmistakably yours.
AI can’t reproduce that stuff. It has no history or personality. It just predicts what sounds ‘right’ based on patterns it’s seen before.
And most of what it’s seen isn’t great writing. It’s corporate sludge: jargon, passive voice and interchangeable filler words.
That’s the language that dominates the internet. That’s what AI learned.
So Sylvester didn’t just lose his voice. He swapped it for the voice of every bad corporate memo ever written.
The writing looks fine. And that’s the problem.
Consider if any of these feel familiar:
- The proposal that had everything right – structure, numbers, credentials – and still wasn’t accepted.
- The polished, ‘professional’ email that got no reply.
- The stakeholder who keeps asking for more information instead of just making a bloody decision.
On the surface, it’s easy to blame timing, the audience or bad luck.
But often the problem is simpler than that. The writing is saying all the right things… without making anyone feel anything.
Readers do a fast little trust scan every time they open something you’ve written. Is there a real person behind this? Someone sharp? Someone I can work with?
Good writing answers those questions before the reader even realises they’re asking. But AI-generated writing usually doesn’t, because it removes the very signals people trust.
And people feel that absence, even if they can’t quite explain why.
The writing may sound polished, but it rarely creates confidence, connection or a conversion – which is exactly when a communication problem becomes a business problem.
How to build the complete writer
To be clear, I’m not against AI writing tools. They make teams faster – and that matters.
But we’ve been so dazzled by AI’s speed that we’ve let it become the author instead of the assistant.
What professional writers understand (and what many AI-assisted teams don’t yet) is that the real work happens on either side of the first draft.
Before it, there’s the thinking: understanding the audience, clarifying the intent and defining the action you want the reader to take.
And after it, there’s the judgment: knowing what’s missing, what’s weak and how to add humanity back into the work.
That’s a skill. And like every skill, it can be taught.
We’ve built an entirely new course around this exact challenge.
Not to push back against AI writing tools, but to help teams use them without losing the judgment and personality that make communication persuasive in the first place.
The goal is to create a ‘complete writer’: someone who can use AI to work faster, while still producing writing that’s sharp, human and unmistakably real.
So: when did you last read something from your team and think, that sounds exactly like them?