Perfect spelling, but…

I’m a fan of AI.

I use it regularly, and I think it’s one of the most useful tools to arrive in years. It helps me overcome writer’s block, tidy up awkward sentences, challenge my thinking, and occasionally rescue me from my own terrible punctuation.

But there is something I’ve noticed.

Sometimes AI makes me sound far more impressed with my own opinions than I actually am.

The Problem Isn’t Usually Accuracy

Most of the time, AI produces perfectly reasonable content.

The spelling is correct. The grammar is polished. The structure makes sense. In many cases, it genuinely improves what you’ve written.

The problem is tone.

You start with something fairly modest:

“This worked for me, but your experience may be different.”

A few prompts later, it has somehow become:

“This approach fundamentally redefines how we should think about the challenge.”

It’s the same basic idea, but now it sounds like you’ve emerged from a cave carrying stone tablets.

The Great Language Inflation Machine

AI has a habit of inflating things.

A suggestion becomes a strategy.

A strategy becomes a framework.

A framework becomes a transformative vision for the future.

Before long, a simple blog post about organising your notes sounds like the launch of a new world order.

The strange thing is that you don’t always notice it happening while you’re writing. The words flow nicely. The sentences sound intelligent. Everything feels polished.

Then you read it back a week later and wonder who on earth wrote it.

Readers Want a Person (Probably)

Most people don’t read blogs because they’re looking for perfect prose.

They read them because they’re interested in another person’s experience, opinions, mistakes, successes, and occasional moments of confusion.

That’s what makes writing engaging.

People connect with people.

Not with content that sounds as though it has been approved by a committee of management consultants and motivational speakers.

The Risk of Losing Your Voice

One of the dangers of relying too heavily on AI is that it slowly nudges you towards a voice that isn’t really yours.

The ideas remain yours.

The experiences remain yours.

But the language starts drifting.

You read a paragraph and think:

“I agree with every word of that, but I don’t think I’d ever actually say it.”

That should probably be a clue.

If you’re writing a blog, your voice is one of the few things that makes it uniquely yours. Once that disappears, you’re left with competent writing that could have been written by anyone.

Using AI Without Becoming AI

For me, AI works best as an assistant rather than an author.

I use it to produce ideas, suggest structure, spot weaknesses, and occasionally tell me when I’m rambling.

What I try not to do is accept everything it produces simply because it sounds clever.

In fact, some of the best editing happens when I remove the sentence that sounds the most impressive.

Usually that’s the sentence AI was most proud of.

I Haven’t Always Passed This Test

I should admit that I haven’t always got this right myself.

Looking back at some of my AI-assisted posts, there are moments where I’ve somehow ended up standing on an imaginary soapbox, sounding as though I’ve discovered the cure-all for whatever topic I happened to be discussing that day.

The ideas were mine, but the delivery occasionally became a little too grand, a little too certain, and a little too pleased with itself.

That’s one of the subtle traps of AI. It can take a perfectly reasonable observation and dress it up as a profound revelation.

Am I going back and rewriting those posts?

Absolutely not.

They reflect where I was at the time and what I was learning. Besides, constantly looking backwards isn’t much of a strategy.

Don’t look back. Do better.

[FADE TO GREY]