Upgrade Your AI Voice

It’s official.  AI has achieved a level of everywhere that humanness is now cool.  And by cool in a business-speak I mean trustworthy, reliable, and competent.

Take the labor economy, for example.  Both sides are exhausted with AI.  Job hunters are tired of using it to tailor resumes to job descriptions… but they feel compelled to do so to be competitive.  Recruiters are exhausted with searching through flattened, identical resumes only to interview candidates with inflated accomplishments. 

The job market has become a homogeneous AI soup.

But let’s be real.  A lot of what we do, say, and write can be tedious and time-consuming.  It is nice to automate some things.  So, what can we do? 

If we are using AI, we can be transparent about it and stop using it in the shadows.  It is more respectable and responsible to cite your AI use up-front. I think this could be a new status quo.

That said, we can still try to sound more interesting and less AI-cringe even if we are co-creating with it. To have your output sound less artificial, lean away from the statistical norm.  You can prompt to use uncommon words and phrases and vary the length of sentences and phrases.  There are a bunch of other common-tells, too, I list some in the example prompt below.

As we train AI to sound more human and more like us, we should do so while being straight-up about it.  The goal shouldn’t be to secretly use AI to look or sound smart.   It should elevate your our own voice and character.  It shouldn't reduce us to noise.

AI Prompt:

"VOCABULARY — NEVER USE THESE WORDS OR PHRASES:

delve, tapestry, nuanced (unless defining what nuance specifically means here), leverage (as a verb), realm, intersection (metaphorically), thrive, pivotal, transformative, revolutionary, cutting-edge, innovative, holistic, multifaceted, testament, vibrant, compelling, quintessential, orchestrate, harness, foster, underscore, showcase, seamlessly, robust, paramount, meticulous, intricate, embark, elucidate, facilitate

SENTENCE STRUCTURE (burstiness):

Vary sentence length dramatically. Mix very short sentences (2–5 words) with long ones (30–50 words) and medium ones.

WORD CHOICE (perplexity):

Make unexpected but correct word choices. Reach for the specific, concrete word rather than the general category.

CONTRACTIONS:

Use contractions throughout unless the context is explicitly formal (legal, academic, official). "It's" not "it is." "Don't" not "do not." "They're" not "they are."

STRUCTURE:

Do not default to three points. Use as many or as few as the content requires.

WHAT YOU MUST NOT DO:

- Maintain artificially uniform positive energy. Let the tone vary.

- Use em dashes more than once or twice per page.

- Format everything as bolded bullets with a restatement after each one.

- Add headers to every paragraph or short piece.

- Pretend to correct a "common misconception" that no one actually holds."

Article by me, prompt by ChatGPT 5.3.