The difference is that your “voice” is stamped into the personality DNA expressed by your choice of words, sentence structure and rhythm.
Studio City Web
Unfortunately, as the title suggests, readers can often sense AI writing within the first sentence or even the title! Just a few tell-tale signs are:
- hyped enthusiasm
- superfluous adjectives
- the Em Dash — the biggest ouch you see everywhere! (Yes, I just used the em dash to exemplify what it is! It is used in place of commas or parentheses, or in place of a color to connect two clauses.)
- overuse of colons in headings (This is my pet peeve 😫 with Google’s Gemini AI, as in this “gem” it gave me recently: “Your Dedicated Website Partner: Expert Management & Development”.
My complaint is that AI’s over-reliance on pause punctuation isn’t artful writing. It is a bandage, a quick-fix, which looks and sounds cheesy. The oft-seen enthusiastic use of words and phrases such as, “Elevate”, “Delve”, “In today’s ever-changing world”, and hyped up marketing lingo are clues that the content was cranked out when someone prompted an AI tool to write website and marketing copy.
My own writing is not without fault (especially with comma use). But in defense of human writing, at least you are getting an intentionally crafted expression from a human, rather than one delegated and entrusted in an algorithm to assemble. Our imperfections are the badge of our authenticity.
Sure, it may feel clever to use a life-hack such as writing with an AI tool, but once the glow of novelty fades, people realize that it is not everything wonderful. Once you recognize the clues that are the hallmarks of AI writing characteristics, you will be more conscientious about manually editing. You may not want to hear the truth, but delegating your production of communication entirely to technology isn’t something you can in good conscience do right now.
Until the technology evolves a bit more and can better adhere to your writing style, you will need to humanize and personalize your writing by revising what the AI tools give you. Yes, editing with your own brain power partially defeats the purpose of using AI to help you write. However, it is a much better result when you come across to the reader sounding like yourself. The difference is that your “voice” is stamped into the personality DNA expressed by your choice of words, sentence structure and rhythm.
Like many things in life, both of the following things can be true; It is just a matter of choosing what aligns with your priorities:
Editing your AI generated content diminishes the benefit of using Ai,
and
Putting out machine generated content for your readers diminishes the reading experience and the connection you make with people through your writing.
Happy writing!
This article written 100% by myself without the use of AI 😉
Here is a great source on punctuation dashes: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365-life-hacks/writing/types-of-dashes
