Am I Starting to Sound Like AI?

When everyone sounds polished, being real is the whole game.

Mar 25, 2026

I’ve been thinking a lot about my writing lately. And, honestly, it’s been making me a little self-conscious.

Not in a “I can’t put words on a page” way. More like I keep asking myself: does this sound like me? Or does it sound like everyone else’s polished, well-organized, slightly soulless LinkedIn post? Or worse — like AI slop?

Here’s my situation: I learned to write from academics, policy wonks, and State Department editors. People who valued precision, structure, evidence — and conformity. That training made me a clear thinker. It also gave me a writing style that is, let’s say, not exactly setting anyone’s hair on fire.

When we launched the American Committee to Save Bosnia in the early ‘90s, activists used to mock me — lovingly, I hope — about my Action Alerts. They basically said they lacked heart. Were uninspiring. I worked on it. I got better. And eventually Zbigniew Brzezinski — President Carter’s National Security Advisor, a member of our Executive Committee, and the grad school professor who taught me how to think and write in a disciplined way — accused me of being too emotional and intense.

So somewhere between “heartless policy memo” and “Brzezinski thinks you’ve gone too far,” there’s a sweet spot. I’m still looking for it.

Because when I’m talking — coaching someone, leading a live session on Aura, speaking to a campus audience, or just talking with a friend — something different comes out. Looser. More alive. The stories land. The passion is palpable. People lean in. I inspire.

There’s a gap between my written voice and my actual voice. And lately, it feels wider.

Part of it is AI. I use Claude to give me feedback on my writing — grammar, flow, clarity, holes in my argument. It’s genuinely useful. But I’ve started to wonder: am I unconsciously smoothing myself out to match what “good writing” looks like in an AI-assisted world? Are we all doing that?

Part of it might be a throwback to writing intelligence analyses for the Secretary of State — where sounding like everyone else wasn’t a bug, it was the job. Old habits.

So I’ve started experimenting. I speak first. Into my phone, or from a live session on one of the meditation apps I work with. Then I shape it into something organized. The raw material is messier. But it’s mine. You can hear me in it.

I was listening to Hard Fork recently — the New York Times tech podcast — and they were wrestling with this exact thing. Smart people with something real to say, now second-guessing every sentence because AI can produce clean prose in seconds. They even admitted to deliberately making sentences sound weird so they don’t come across as AI-generated.

Which raises a real question: are we about to silence a whole generation of valuable voices — people who aren’t flashy writers but have something worth saying — because they don’t sound quirky enough? Are we going to mistake “sounds polished” for “must be AI”?

I don’t think good writing has to be showy or weird. I think it has to be honest. Your cadence. Your stories. Your particular way of seeing the world. The goal isn’t to sound like a writer. The goal is to make someone feel less alone, or see something differently, or take one step they wouldn’t have taken otherwise.

To inspire. To connect.

That’s what I’m going for. Still figuring out how to get there consistently.

If you’re wrestling with this too, I’d really love to hear about it.