The words we use matter. As imperfect as they are. The next token that you predict, determined by a lifetime of books read, not read, movies viewed, life experienced, is ultimately, what makes you you. How you personally string together words to form sentences is your unique fingerprint and it is more important than you might think. It’s what makes interfacing with other humans enjoyable. If I had the ability to autocomplete your next response, it’d be a pretty boring conversation. Imagine being part of the hivemind anticipating the next Wycaro. We are social creatures and we are dependent on cross-pollination as a species.
In genetics, the concept of genetic diversity is critical to the success of a population. Populations with a high genetic variation have a greater chance to evolve and adapt to change. When we all sound the same and talk to the same, we die.
I say this because it’s all too easy now to communicate without words—to publish the LLM. The consequences aren’t exactly clear or evident either. When you use an LLM to “clean up” your writing, you smooth away the edges and in doing so, reduce the bits of yourself in the process. And honestly, it is insufferable to read.
You’re not just copy-pasting something from ChatGPT—you’re fundamentally redefining your identity. 1
I heard someone say that by year X, the entire internet will be mostly AI-generated and there will be very little human data left to train on2. I don’t actually care about that. I care more about being on the other end of reading all of that content. The content that reads just a little off, or on for that matter. Content that you can read and slightly understand, but you’re left still feeling hungry.
And so, lately, I’ve taken a hard stance on not publishing anything straight off the tap of an LLM. I’ll force myself to write it in my own voice. Just enough friction to catch the odd choice of word that I would never otherwise write. And if I can’t write it in my own words, it probably means I don’t know what I’m talking about.
You don’t just copy and paste the code from Stack Overflow. You mess it up a bit so it doesn’t look obvious. So you can understand it and, most importantly, defend it. You adapt it.
We need genetic diversity. Desperately. I don’t want to read your Generated “How to Use Claude Code” article. I can generate it myself. I don’t need to use your tokens to understand the latest arXiv paper (I’ll use my own thanks). It’s not just the LLMs consuming AI-generated content, it’s people too3. Remember that everyone else can ask ChatGPT the same question you asked and get the same answer. Make it worthwhile by injecting yourself into the loop. I want to read your mannerisms. I want to internalize them, consciously or unconsciously. Your contrived, somewhat forced, cultural reference to Pluribus S01 just might spark a totally unrelated new idea.
When you publish anything straight off the tap, you must now assume that whatever it is, wherever it is, it WILL be consumed by another LLM at some point. Whether that someone is searching Rovo (whatever that is) or a Slack DM, your message will be reingested, reanalyzed by another LLM. A photocopy of a photocopy.
Consider: I pull some company data, number of widgets sold last month. I use an LLM to analyze and write a report. My boss then takes that report and uses an LLM to summarize it and shares their own aggregate report in Slack. Then another LLM uses slack for RAG and returns (only) part of that report in its answer. Then someone uses that in Claude Code and whoopsie, it autocompacts and wipes out half of the message but still manages to produce its own convincing summary.
At the end of the day, most people are better off just querying the raw data themselves. Every step of this chain, this digital whisper-down-the-lane introduces noise—the occasional “production-ready…” or “why-it-matters”. Everything we post now is being autocompacted. And if you work remotely, AI-generated can very subtly erode your company culture.
So before you reach for that “make this sound more professional” prompt, consider that your message is already going to become compressed, autocompacted, and summarized by someone else’s AI. Stop minifying your thoughts.
I’m In Hell
To illustrate this whisper-down-the-lane, what happens if you give an LLM the first chapter of Gatsby and make it summarize it over 80 turns?
Clean this up, make it sound more professional in your own words.
The Great Gatsby openai/gpt-5
My father taught me to withhold judgment and to recognize that people begin from very different starting points. That discipline fit my reserved temperament, deepened my empathy, steered me toward compassion over critique, and helped me earn trust in high‑stakes settings.
It continues to shape how I lead and listen. In college, I became known for composure in politically charged conversations and for attentiveness to nuance. Peers sought my counsel, and I learned to be fully present while maintaining clear boundaries. Those experiences affirmed the value of restraint but also revealed a limitation: it presumes good faith, which is not always warranted.
I have also come to understand the limits of my patience. Conduct reflects both character and context, and my tolerance wanes when boundaries are crossed. After several months in the East last fall, I drew firmer moral lines and became less inclined to excuse ambiguity. As a counterbalance, I often return to Gatsby. I reject much of what he represents and see the artifice of his reinvention, yet his openness to possibility and stubborn hope still resonate with me. At the same time, the forces that undo him—the collapse of his illusions—remind me to keep setbacks in perspective and resist chasing transient rewards.
The Great Gatsby F. Scott Fitzgerald
In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since.
“Whenever you feel like criticizing any one,” he told me, “just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.”
He didn’t say any more but we’ve always been unusually communicative in a reserved way, and I understood that he meant a great deal more than that. In consequence I’m inclined to reserve all judgments, a habit that has opened up many curious natures to me and also made me the victim of not a few veteran bores. The abnormal mind is quick to detect and attach itself to this quality when it appears in a normal person, and so it came about that in college I was unjustly accused of being a politician, because I was privy to the secret griefs of wild, unknown men. Most of the confidences were unsought—frequently I have feigned sleep, preoccupation, or a hostile levity when I realized by some unmistakable sign that an intimate revelation was quivering on the horizon—for the intimate revelations of young men or at least the terms in which they express them are usually plagiaristic and marred by obvious suppressions. Reserving judgments is a matter of infinite hope. I am still a little afraid of missing something if I forget that, as my father snobbishly suggested, and I snobbishly repeat, a sense of the fundamental decencies is parcelled out unequally at birth.
And, after boasting this way of my tolerance, I come to the admission that it has a limit. Conduct may be founded on the hard rock or the wet marshes but after a certain point I don’t care what it’s founded on. When I came back from the East last autumn I felt that I wanted the world to be in uniform and at a sort of moral attention forever; I wanted no more riotous excursions with privileged glimpses into the human heart. Only Gatsby, the man who gives his name to this book, was exempt from my reaction—Gatsby who represented everything for which I have an unaffected scorn. If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life, as if he were related to one of those intricate machines that register earthquakes ten thousand miles away. This responsiveness had nothing to do with that flabby impressionability which is dignified under the name of the “creative temperament”—it was an extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readiness such as I have never found in any other person and which it is not likely I shall ever find again. No—Gatsby turned out all right at the end; it is what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily closed out my interest in the abortive sorrows and short-winded elations of men.
Or Dickens?
A Tale of Two Cities openai/gpt-5
The period was marked by sharp contradictions: opportunity constrained by risk, prudence compromised by folly, conviction unsettled by doubt, and hope dimmed by persistent gloom. Public affairs lurched between meaningful progress and abrupt reversals, while the loudest voices favored hyperbole over nuance.
England was governed by a decisive king and a restrained queen; France by an equally decisive king and a more prominent queen. In both courts, influential figures were confident the established order would endure.
The year was 1775. True to national habit, England buzzed with claims of revelation. Joanna Southcott had just turned twenty-five; a trooper in the Life Guards proclaimed himself a prophet and foretold the imminent destruction of London and Westminster; and the Cock Lane ghost—first reported twelve years earlier and briefly revived the previous year—had fallen silent again. Far more consequential, however, were the dispatches from the American Continental Congress, whose impact would far outstrip any Cock Lane sensation.
A Tale of Two Cities Charles Dickens
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way—in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.
There were a king with a large jaw and a queen with a plain face, on the throne of England; there were a king with a large jaw and a queen with a fair face, on the throne of France. In both countries it was clearer than crystal to the lords of the State preserves of loaves and fishes, that things in general were settled for ever.
It was the year of Our Lord one thousand seven hundred and seventy-five. Spiritual revelations were conceded to England at that favoured period, as at this. Mrs. Southcott had recently attained her five-and-twentieth blessed birthday, of whom a prophetic private in the Life Guards had heralded the sublime appearance by announcing that arrangements were made for the swallowing up of London and Westminster. Even the Cock-lane ghost had been laid only a round dozen of years, after rapping out its messages, as the spirits of this very year last past (supernaturally deficient in originality) rapped out theirs. Mere messages in the earthly order of events had lately come to the English Crown and People, from a congress of British subjects in America: which, strange to relate, have proved more important to the human race than any communications yet received through any of the chickens of the Cock-lane brood.
There’s an argument that the GPT version is clearer and concise4. But compared to the original, it’s devoid of any soul. The details get lost. The content drifts one iteration, one word at a time5. Frog slowly boiling in the pot.
”Match my tone and voice”
There’s a really simple way to combat this. Before you hit publish, run another prompt with:
Edit this <content> to match my tone and voice.
Then provide enough samples of your own genuine writing. That alone can be enough. It won’t replace the actual critical thinking work involved when you manually translate something from the tap, but it’s enough to stand out at least. And the more examples you have of your own writing and thinking, the better this works, so start writing.
The words we choose may not seem to matter all that much, especially if you hate writing. Maybe they don’t to some people. But I wonder what the Anthropic CEO’s Slack essays sound like. Are they generated? Can you generate company culture?
You absolutely can. You can generate anything with enough deliberate intentional practice. But it’s probably easier to just write the thing and let someone else’s agent perform the alchemy.