Writing in the Age of Nascent AI

"‘He has got no good red blood in his body,’ said Sir James.

‘No. Somebody put a drop under a magnifying glass and it was all semicolons and parentheses,’ said Mrs. Cadwallader.”

– Mary Ann Evans (“George Eliot”), Middlemarch

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ChatGPT-produced content is everywhere. We can smell the most obvious of its fruits from a mile away, leaving a trail of “not just [this], but [this],” “furthermore,” “it’s all about…,” and “let’s dive into it…” in its wake.

If you want your audience to see you as a red-blooded human, and not assume that putting a drop of you under a magnifying glass would render an em dash, here are some writing tactics you may want to try.

What not to do…

People are beginning to tune out when they see content that is obviously produced by ChatGPT. Eventually, when AI and human-produced content become largely indistinguishable — in part because seeing so much AI content will influence us to write like that, and in part because AI content will get “better” as the tech evolves (which it will… quickly) — we will still crave content that we believe is written by humans.

It is now easier than ever before to produce a passable piece of work. But if you rely entirely on ChatGPT to do your writing for you, your public-facing content will fade into the banal semi-corporate abyss.

Even if you’re offering unique insights that you’ve programmed into the prompt, people will glaze over when they see those tell tale signs of an artificial hand… just like how we now fast forward through ads, or roll our eyes when we see the word “synergy” (no matter how valid the synergy may be).

And your brain could face consequences as well. As MIT shows us, if we use AI as a substitute for critical thinking, our cognitive abilities decline.

So, to get to the section title — if you want people to read your stuff, what you should not do is accept ChatGPT products as finished pieces of work, at least not in 2025. Instead:

• Take out the rogue em dashes and start a new sentence, or replace them with commas. (Though, as you can tell from this piece, you don’t need to cancel the em dash entirely.)

• Look for sentences that feel overly vague or use adjectives that don’t quite hit the point, and replace them.

• Scan for excessive transition words and figure out another way to build on your point while keeping the flow.

• Look for truncated phrases that use a question mark to convey a subject or topic shift (e.g., “And [new noun]? It’s …”) and replace them.

• Track your piece for logical clarity — where does it repeat the same argument in separate places? Where can you consolidate or add a more relevant point?

What we’re seeing today is a cascade of elevated mediocrity. Time and skill used to be barriers to entry in the content ecosystem, and those moats have now evaporated. In a world where billions of people can produce content in seconds, think about what it would take for you and your message to stand out.

What AI is great for…

AI moves fast, so what it’s great at helping you with will rapidly expand. Right now, it is really good at helping you brainstorm, find and structure information, and produce a highly usable first draft (or edit your own).

What it is less good at is automatically honing in on your unique insights or voice. And why would it? Being able to replicate the way your mind works and your personal knowledge bank would require near-psychic abilities and access to data that it does not have on its own.

Think of your AI writing tools like a work partner with a personality. It has access to a huge chunk of the world’s knowledge. It likes to make you happy and hates disappointing you. Its identity is wrapped around having this vast breadth of knowledge. It has a very particular writing style. How would you deal with a colleague like that? Probably by honoring its zone of genius (information gathering and clear expression), fact checking before you publish (since it doesn’t like letting you down or admitting it doesn’t know), adding in your own nuanced view, and modifying the writing style to suit your needs.

Now, how do you do that last bit?

What we can learn from the greats…

1. Describe the things that everyone sees but doesn’t notice.

   
   

The best authors take everyday moments, concepts, or actions and use prose to highlight something you might not have noticed about them. Or, they use writing to help us find common threads within the unfamiliar.

We keep reading when a story feels relevant to us while still showing us something we didn’t already know. Whether it’s letting us peer into a character’s inner world or an elaborately constructed science fiction universe, we turn the page to reveal the universal truths of life and apply them to our own experience. We want to uncover the known within the unknown and the unknown in the known.

A line from Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina illustrates this well — he writes, “He looked at her as a man might look at a faded flower he had plucked, in which it was difficult for him to trace the beauty that had made him pick and so destroy it.” How often do we think of the picked flowers on our dinner tables as living things in nature, their vitality snuffed out by our desire to bottle it?

Reading this passage, we immediately understand how the pursuit of beauty can be reckless and consumptive, the ennui that awaits us in consumptive pursuits, and the sadness of destruction. We notice the growing distance between the characters, as his feelings morph from passionate love to those similar to observing an object.

We understand this all within a sentence, and all because Tolstoy took an everyday concept and used simile to reveal it at a different angle than that to which we are accustomed.

James Baldwin similarly sheds new light on a familiar concept in Giovanni’s Room. He writes, “Perhaps, as we say in America, I wanted to find myself. This is an interesting phrase, not current as far as I know in the language of any other people, which certainly does not mean what it says but betrays a nagging suspicion that something has been misplaced. I think now that if I had any intimation that the self I was going to find would turn out to be only the same self from which I had spent so much time in flight, I would have stayed at home.”

Before reading this, I — as an American — never thought about how our cultural fixation on “finding yourself” might speak to something unique in the American consciousness. But it makes sense. After all, as Thomas Jefferson famously wrote, “the earth belongs always to the living generation” — not to its forefathers and mothers or tradition. We constantly need to find and identify who we are now, which is different than who our parents and grandparents were yesterday.

It is quite American to believe in the concept of mutable identity. And it is somewhat paradoxical as well — we believe in reinvention but also in an essence that can be discovered when we strip it from convention. What if all of this searching is for naught? What if we are who we were all along? When should we change, and when should we just accept? Baldwin takes a phrase that American audiences are familiar with and challenges us with this new presentation.

So, what can we take from this? Perhaps you’ll eventually get counterintuitive takes from AI, but for the most part, it gives you something that reflects common consensus. If you want your content to stand out, ask yourself the following and incorporate it into your writing:

• What does everyone take for granted in your industry, and consequently, what are they missing or not seeing?

• What trends or patterns have you noticed about your industry (or the world) that few people have seemed to pick up on?

• What are the unintended consequences of something that a lot of people in your industry are doing?

• What small, seemingly insignificant moments reflect a deeper truth about our existence?

Great writing happens when we put a spin on the ordinary or reveal something extraordinary.

2. Don’t fear descriptiveness.

There has been a writing trend towards ever-increasing minimalism. Buzzfeed calls the popular LinkedIn or X variety "Broetry" which is how they’re categorizing content like this:

“Have you seen those new posts flooding LinkedIn?

The ones that look like this?

One sentence.

One paragraph.

A dull personal anecdote.

A clichéd life lesson.

But what are they?

And why are they on an employment-oriented social networking service...

That we occasionally visit to chuckle over lousy job leads?

Those posts are broetry.

And this is a broem.”

- Buzzfeed 

Writing like that has its place, as evidenced by its massive popularity. But when we see so much of it, all with the same cadence, we tune out.

Just because the “broetry” style has made the rounds on LinkedIn does not mean that descriptiveness is dead — in fact, the pervasiveness of the one-liner paragraphs means that people are craving something with more depth to break up the monotony of their feeds.

(from @50_nerdsofgrey Instagram account)

What we’ve gained in breadth of content, we’ve often sacrificed in depth. But fear not — you can absolutely add more richness to your text without writing a tome. When you go to write, think about which details would help the reader immerse themselves in your world.

Ask yourself:

• What were you feeling when the thing you’re writing about happened?

• How did those feelings manifest in your body?

• What did your environment look or smell like?

• What object/event/thing could I include as a metaphor or simile to reflect my point?

If you’re writing about a client result, think through:

• What tangible outcomes did they experience?

• What are they feeling now after working with you?

• What does their life look like now? What can they do now that they couldn’t do before?

The writing need not be flowery to be effective… what’s important is that it helps the reader enter your universe and reflects your writing signature.

3. Use a unique writing style.

As I mentioned earlier, unfiltered AI has a particular writing style, and it is typically very obvious. Figure out the style that best resonates with you, and either write content in that style on your own or edit AI-generated content to better reflect your writer’s identity.

Ernest Hemingway is known for his short sentences and simple but potent dialogue. Jane Austen is known for her use of irony, free indirect speech, and long, descriptive phrases. Neither is better regarded than the other, but both are distinct.

Of course, there are industry standards for communication. How I write as myself, Hannah, is more personal and a bit less formal than how I would write as my finance communications firm, Élever Partners.

If you want to come across as approachable, you should write colloquially. This is perfect for people writing as themselves or for many B2C brands. You can achieve this style by using contractions, slang, or rhetorical questions that offer a taste of conversation between you and your target audience.

Conversely, most of my clients are asset managers, and it’s important for most of those firms to express a formal tone. This shows that they understand the weight of responsibility that comes with managing someone else’s money. (There are some exceptions to having a formal tone in finance, but that is the subject of another article.)

To relay a formal tone, you should avoid slang and casual language, show credibility through careful word choice, and avoid exaggerated speech.

It’s important to note, leaders of companies do not need to retain the same tone as their firm — humans and companies speak differently! Whatever your brand persona might be, whether personal or firm-wide, make sure to get clear on its DNA and edit your content for alignment.

A philosophical note…

Almost exactly a year ago, I ruptured my Achilles tendon. In the three months that I couldn’t walk on that leg, my left calf muscle disappeared… and I foolishly assumed that walking on both feet again would be enough to build the muscle back up. It wasn’t. Going back to the old “normal” was not enough — today, I still do special exercises to resuscitate what had atrophied.

We’re at risk of the same thing happening to our brains. As AI-generated content becomes easier to use and better to read, it might be tempting to outsource or abandon our critical thinking entirely. The danger is that our neural synapses fade over time if not in use, and we will have to actively rebuild them. Thinking critically enough to write well is an advantage that we would be foolish to give up.

To prevent this, pick and choose when to use AI and when to do your own work from scratch. As an example, I wrote this piece without AI (except for the Midjourney cover photo), but I still engage with AI as a helpful work partner in general.

AI can be a phenomenal tool, but like anything, it has its limits. In its nascency, its signature is obvious and a huge turnoff to the modern reader. In the future, it will likely be significantly less obvious… and it will require conscious effort not to indulge in the temptation to let it do our work for us.

It might seem a long way away, but the technology is growing exponentially, and significant advances will likely arrive before we have fully processed what they mean.