Dear Writer, You Sound Like a Bot

Here's how to fix it before everyone notices

Howdy, Wealth Gang🤠

I started writing seriously about a year ago.

Or at least, that’s what I told myself.

So I did what any rookie does: I looked for role models.

I studied how the pros wrote.

Scrolled through endless articles from “thought leaders” who claimed to have mastered business and life.

And slowly, something started to bother me.

They all sounded the same.

Different names in different niches, but the same rhythm with perfectly phrased punchlines.

Even their “vulnerability” felt standardized, like it had gone through emotional quality control.

That’s when I realized the dark joke behind it all:

90% of them were using AI.

It hit me like a glitch in the matrix.

I kept trying to learn how to sound human from people who’d outsourced their humanity to machines.

Consuming synthetic voices pretending to be authentic, algorithmically optimized to mimic sincerity.

No wonder it all felt flat.

But what choice did I have?

Writing everything from scratch sounds noble, right?

Authentic, handcrafted words made with suffering and a lot of coffee.

But in today’s world, that’s not practical.

If you insist on writing every sentence the slow, human way, your competitors, armed with AI speed and SEO precision will crush you.

They’ll flood the timeline while you’re still rewriting your introduction.

By the time your article finally drops, theirs will already have a hundred restacks and a course attached.

So you end up caught in this weird tension:

Use AI and risk losing your voice, or avoid it and risk irrelevance.

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On social platforms, hundreds of thousands of posts compete for attention every day.

Hooks will get people to click.

Frameworks will keep them reading.

But it’s your voice that earns their follow & trust.

With it, your words cut through the noise, build emotional connection, and magnetize the right audience.

That’s the paradox of being a writer right now:

Your voice matters more than ever, but it’s never been harder to have one.

So in today’s post you will learn:

✓ How you can use AI without losing yourself.
✓ How to draw the line between inspiration and imitation.
✓ How to survive this new ecosystem where originality has to fight automation.

And I won’t teach it alone.

I’ve brought in Mia Kiraki, creator of ROBOTS ATE MY HOMEWORK.

She builds systems and workflows that turn your brain into a weapon instead of letting AI do your thinking for you.

Her newsletter is basically Mia having a very long argument with the internet about why strategy actually matters.

And now she has the stage. :)

The Myth of the Unique Voice

The idea of “pure originality” is a fairy tale we love to tell ourselves.

Every writer who’s ever mattered has borrowed at some point. T.S. Eliot stole from Dante. Tarantino didn’t invent anything, he just recombined everything he’d watched until it became his. Hip-hop was built on sampling. Shakespeare rewrote Greek tragedies and nobody gave him shit for it because what he created was so “him” that originality stopped mattering.

The Romantic idea of the writer is marketing. Real writers have always been thieves because they steal structures, rhythms, sometimes even ideas. Then they filter everything through their own obsessions and lived experiences until it becomes something you’d never head before.

AI now makes that visible. It’s theft in real time. LLMs pull from thousands of sources and spit out stuff that resembles writing. It feels like cheating because you can see the machinery, but we, writers, always had that. We just called it “Reading” and “Studying” instead of “Training data”.

This is never an excuse to use AI mindlessly, but it should kill the myth that originality means creating from nothing. Originality IS remix + intention. It’s taking what exists and running it through your particular lens. And that’s something AI still can’t do.

What “Voice” Actually Means

Voice is how you write and what you pay attention to. Someone with a voice doesn’t sound like everyone else because they don’t think like everyone else.

This is essentially why out-of-the-box AI-written content sounds the same. It’s not that the language is robotic - sometimes, it’s genuinely smooth. But unfortunately it always misses the worldview behind it. An AI doesn’t care if you believe it, nor does it have a reputation to protect or a weird opinion that might cost it followers. It’s playing the game optimally, which means it plays it safely.

And safety kills voice.

Your voice is your identity. You can excavate it even though it’s a slow, uncomfortable work - figuring out what you actually think, then having the guts to say it. But readers do feel the difference and that’s where your advantage lies.

How AI Changes the Definition of Originality

The old definition of originality required you to create alone, in isolation. Use anything external and you’d failed.

I think that definition was always broken.

What we’re moving toward looks different, and I like to call that “authentic synthesis”. You pull from multiple places and run everything through your particular filter. That’s curation at the highest level.

AI acts as your first-draft machine and you’re the one making actual decisions:

What stays because it sounds like you?

What gets deleted because it sounds like everyone else?

And for the love of writing, don’t ever aim for a piece of content to be perfect. It’s imperfection that separates you from the templates.

The Psychological Toll on Writers

Are you tired of being compared? Or comparing yourself to others?

I am sometimes! And building in this space has given me a front-row seat to how awful this gets for creators.

The impostor syndrome is amplified by AI when you write something you believe in, and then use Claude on a rough idea. You then pause and think: Was I ever actually good at this? Why did Claude do in seconds what took me HOURS to figure out?

The doubt gets worse when you see creators with way less experience outpacing you because they’re using all sorts of tools and you’re still grinding. The algorithm rewards speed, so speed starts to feel like talent.

If you’ve ever asked yourself “Am I just replaceable at this point?”, no, you’re not. At least theoretically. Maybe practically. If your audience doesn’t know whether you wrote it or a machine did, what’s the point of you? That’s what you need to work on.

Finding Your Voice in the Noise

The algorithm doesn’t care about silence and it doesn’t reward you for sitting under a tree and watching birds. So, almost nobody does this anymore, and that’s exactly why you should.

Most creators are speed-reading the same productivity newsletter, consuming the same frameworks. You’re also probably mining the same shallow well.

Try to go beyond that for a month and see where that takes you: read widely. Read fiction. Read challenging non-fiction. Philosophy. Things that don’t directly feed your brand. Things that make you think differently.

The ritual part matters too. A walk where you leave your phone at home. An hour with a book that has nothing to do with your niche.

You get quiet, read widely, and let your mind wander. And suddenly, you’ll have something to say that others don’t.

However, understanding voice in theory is one thing… Living through it in practice is another.

So now Timo will look at the real-world pressure that’s behind the AI hype.

The AI Boom and Its Impact on Writing Culture

I started writing right as AI tools went mainstream, which means I never saw the “before times.”

No era of slow, tortured drafting ever existed for me.

Just prompts, templates, and bots ready to finish my sentences.

Writing online already felt like a race, and AI turned it into a full sprint.

Everywhere I looked, someone preached “productivity,” “efficiency,” or “instant creativity.”

But underneath all that shine, something felt off.

The goal wasn’t to say something but rather to publish something.

The Temptation of Speed vs. the Loss of Soul

AI hooks you like cocaine because it’s fast.

You type a headline, and tools like Claude or ChatGPT instantly hand you a full post, formatted and fluent.

For personal brands trying to keep up with algorithms, that’s gold.

You can ship three LinkedIn posts before breakfast.

But that speed turns into a double-edged sword.

When everything you publish comes from a prompt, you stop wrestling with ideas.

You skip the messy part of actually thinking with your own brain. :)

It’s seen all over social media…

Every “personal brand” post starts with the same hook formula, the same three-line structure, the same tone of pseudo-wisdom.

Scroll for five minutes and you’ll see twenty people sharing “My 7 Lessons from Failure,” all written like they attended the same AI bootcamp.

The more we chase speed, the more our voices start to sound like templates.

And underneath it all sits the quiet fear no one wants to name:

If AI can write well enough, will anyone notice when it’s not really you anymore?

That’s the psychological toll of a creeping sense that your own relevance depends on how human you can still sound in a machine-made world.

How to Use AI Without Losing Yourself

Let’s be honest: most of us aren’t “writing” from scratch anymore.

We’re prompting.

You open a tool, toss in an idea, and seconds later, you’ve got something that looks ready to post.

The goal isn’t to resist that but to protect your personality from the speed.

The Real Game Changer: Feeding AI Your Story

AI only sounds human when you feed it something human.

Most people type lazy prompts like “write a thread about consistency” and wonder why it sounds robotic.

Of course it does; you gave it nothing to care about.

The magic starts when you give it specifics no one else could fake.

Your stories, results, or emotions.

Try:

“Write a post about how I grew my client list after getting rejected 20 times.”

“Explain how I rebuilt my schedule after burnout last winter.”

Now the AI gains context, texture that breathes life into the writing.

That’s why my tools like Tweet Typer GPT, that I use for Substack notes and X content, always ask for personal experiences and real results.

It’s the only way to ensure the output deserves to be called “personal brand content”.

The New Definition of “Writer”

If you write online today, you’re more of a curator.

You edit machine drafts, analyze data, and translate it all into something that feels like you.

The romantic image of the writer alone at their desk, hammering away at a typewriter with a cigarette burning beside a half-empty coffee cup, has been replaced by someone editing an AI draft while the algorithm decides who gets to read it.

It’s not worse, just different.

Why Human Storytelling Still Drives Connection

No matter how slick AI gets, it can’t want anything.

It can’t crave approval, or regret saying the wrong thing, or stay up at night wondering if a post hit the wrong nerve.

About 10% of readers follow you for your insights and advice.

The other 90% are there because they relate to you.

You’ve failed like they did.

You spoke publicly the truth they carry in their hearts.

This connection flows only from human to human, and no AI can get between that.

You can already see it online…

The writers who still tell personal stories, who show a bit of chaos and honesty, are the ones building loyal followings.

Every personal brand creator should have a background story piece like this.

Where it’s all about you, and the “value” gets pushed aside for the next article. :)

The Return of Human Imperfection

After months of AI-polished posts, readers are tuning them out.

Perfect syntax now reads like spam.

The posts that spread are the ones that sound unfiltered, conversational, maybe even slightly awkward.

Your Quirks Are the Differentiator

AI follows rules; writers bend them.

If your humor’s dark, your tone unpredictable, or your grammar occasionally unhinged, that’s a W.

As a non-native English speaker/writer, the Grammarly Chrome extension saves my ass almost every sentence, but sometimes I just leave the “mistakes” in because they express who I am.

The most memorable creators write how they think, not how their teachers taught them.

✓ Start sentences with “and”
✓ Skip transitions
✓ Use slang

Saying what you’re not supposed to say, but that’s exactly why readers stay.

Being “grammatically correct” or “politically safe” guarantees you’ll sound like everyone else

Saying you dig Kanye West (I’m outing myself right now) and refuse to put commas where they’re supposed to be reminds people it’s you.

So stop sanding down your edges.

In an algorithmic world, your imperfections are proof of life.

Conclusion: The Human Voice Still Wins

For all the power AI brings, it still can’t fake human desire.

That’s the gap no machine can cross.

So it’s where writers will put their focus in 2026.

You can feel it online already.

An article about failing a launch gets more replies than a perfectly structured guide.

A clumsy but heartfelt email builds more trust than a slick newsletter full of buzzwords.

It’s about the moment when someone reads your words and thinks, “Yeah, me too.”

AI can imitate voice, but it can’t create belonging.

That’s your job.

So yes, use the tools, use them fast, use them well.

Let them draft, ideate, summarize, then step in and make it human again.

Feed them your stories, and edit like there are no rules.

Keep the scars, the slang, the contradictions.

And you end up with a piece of content that’s you and still built for real-world results.

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Now you are ready to use AI the right way. :)

How about starting with turning long-form content like Substack articles into
short & punchy pieces, perfect for Substack notes, tweets, and LinkedIn posts.

I created a 100% free AI tool that does exactly that👇

With it, you can turn any article into social content in seconds.

A huge thank-you to Mia Kiraki from ROBOTS ATE MY HOMEWORK for lending her brain to this piece.

If you’re into the messy intersection of tech and creativity, you’ll love her newsletter

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See ya soon

Timo Mason🤠