‘Does this sound like AI?’ You’re asking the wrong question.

We all seem to be trying to stay one step ahead of AI lately. So many fellow copywriters have told me they’re receiving directives from clients and agencies to ban certain words, certain — hem hem — punctuation marks in their work.

I myself have felt the pressure too. I’ve started creating distance between the copy I write now and the rhetorical devices I’ve used for the 12+ years I’ve been in copywriting.

And more and more of my clients edit their work based not on the way they’ve sounded for the past 5 years but out of fear that a certain convention might sound too much like AI.

But here’s the thing I keep wondering:

In the pursuit of sounding less like AI, are we losing our own voice? And will it even be worth it?

1. You can’t outrun a pattern-maker that learns from you.

Claude, ChatGPT, Copilot… They’re all large language models built to detect AND create patterns. It’s literally coded into their genes. It’s how they exist. They read what’s come before and use patterns to predict what should come next. Is it any wonder some patterns crop up a little too much in their outputs?

Once we all start adding strict ‘no em-dash’ rules to our prompts, AI will detect this new pattern and scrap the poor punctuation mark altogether. We banish ‘delve’ and ‘quietly’, and they slowly disappear from its vocab too.

But it’s still a pattern-maker, and so it will just mint fresh clichés to replace the old ones, new tics and taboos we’ll be scrambling to ban all over again.

So we find ourselves on an AI treadmill, forever anticipating and detecting the next AI red flag, forever correcting our own language to suit, often abandoning marketing and rhetorical devices that have served us well for millennia in the process.

And that’s all in an attempt to stay one step ahead of a machine that adjusts the second we do!

2. The lines between AI output and human speech are blurring.

There’s another, trickier part of this equation many of us are overlooking. AI doesn’t just learn from us. It’s not a unidirectional flow here. Human speech is also influenced by AI.

Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development analysed some 740,000 hours of podcast episodes and found that once ChatGPT went mainstream, there was a real spike in its most beloved words in unscripted speech.

In the researchers’ words (and my bolding):

“Words preferentially generated by ChatGPT, such as delve, showcase, boast, intricacies and meticulous, increased abruptly in spontaneous human speech. The measurable influence on spontaneous speech suggests that humans internalize the lexical choices of large language models (LLMs) … these results show that machines trained on human data now feed their own traits back into human language, integrating LLMs into the ongoing processes of cultural evolution.”

Copywriters are trained not just to analyse the words of their clients or brands, but to understand the linguistic preferences of their target audience. To speak in a language that audience would understand; a language that signals an in-group or sense of belonging.

So what happens when the line between the audience’s language and AI’s becomes even more blurred?

3. ‘Tells’ can be a good thing. You’re just focusing on the wrong kind.

Back in the days when I was Head of Content at a digital marketing agency, one of my biggest challenges was getting the junior copywriters to drop their own tone of voice and start sounding more like their clients.

Try as they might, they held onto their own coded linguistic choices — so much so that I could often blindly identify the author of a piece based on a few minute tells (a preference for the ellipsis, a desire to be florally descriptive, a penchant for certain words, references to pop culture that went well over my head).

Since I started freelancing and working more directly with company-of-one founders, one of my favourite jobs has been scouring my clients’ emails, questionnaire responses, and transcripts to glean their linguistic signature.

Some clients prefer words of Anglo-Saxon origin (help rather than assist, get rather than attain; the list is endless). Some of them lean heavily on Australian colloquialisms. Others constantly add funny asides to everything they say or are masters of similes.

In their Brand Voice Guides, I include word banks of Julie-isms and Angela-isms and John-isms. Turns of phrase that thrill me for the pure and simple reason that I’d never think to say something like that myself. I play back transcripts and document verbs and nouns and adjectives that pop up again and again in their speech. Adverbs can be particularly telling.

We all have our own linguistic fingerprint, but few of us actually pay attention to it. And for sole traders, this can be a big problem.

Over the last 18 months, my enquiries inbox has been filled with appeals from small business owners desperate to make their AI-generated copy sound more like them but stumped on how to do it.

We’re hung up on AI tells and red flags. But we’re channelling our energy into the wrong thing.

Coz it isn’t about making sure you avoid AI tells. It’s about knowing your own brand tells, being confident in your own voice, filling your copy with green flags that make it identifiable to anyone scrolling the feeds of LinkedIn, Instagram, X, Threads, TikTok, what have you.

And damn straight, I used an ‘it’s not X, it’s Y’ construction in that last paragraph. I also started a sentence with ‘coz’ and let another one trail along with three clauses. They’re all AI tells.

But it’s also the way I’ve been naturally writing for my brand since 2018, and you betcha I’m not gonna change it for anything, because they’re my brand tells.

I’ve planted my flag in the ground. Here’s how you plant yours.

If you want to pivot from asking ‘does this sound more like AI’ to ‘does this sound more like me’, you need to know what you sound like.

It starts with observation. Pay attention to the patterns in your speech when you’re free‑writing or chatting to friends. Notice your go‑to phrases, words, rhetorical devices. Write them up in an official document and let them form the basis of a consistent brand personality.

And if you know this is something you want to nail but you also know you need a guiding hand, reach out! My 90-Day Content Compass puts me in your corner for a full quarter, digging out your linguistic fingerprint, getting it down on paper, and helping you build the confidence and boundaries to sound unmistakably like you, with or without AI in the mix.