An essay published on September 20 has put a name to a growing complaint about AI-assisted prose: much of it sounds as though it came from the same careful, upbeat and relentlessly polished narrator. Writer and startup veteran Sagiv Ofek says the problem is not the use of artificial intelligence itself, but the loss of individual voice when users accept a model’s stylistic defaults.
Ofek describes a cluster of patterns that now recur across product announcements, LinkedIn posts and online essays. Ideas are joined by immaculate transitions even when an ordinary writer might use two blunt sentences. Products are framed as unlocking new ways of thinking, companies are said to sit at intersections, and straightforward business plans acquire elaborate corporate terminology. Posts frequently move through balanced lists before landing on a contrast between what an issue is supposedly not about and what it is really about.
The result, in Ofek’s account, is technically competent writing that can feel less credible because its imperfections have been removed. Personal observations that do not fit neatly into the argument disappear. Hesitation, abrupt shifts and plain admissions are replaced by a smooth narrative arc. Even expressions of vulnerability can take on a recognizable template, turning an individual experience into language that resembles thousands of other posts.
Ofek is explicit that this is not a case for abandoning writing tools. He says AI can be valuable for cutting a long draft into a readable form or helping an author organize scattered thoughts. The risk arises when the tool’s first-pass phrasing becomes the finished voice. If many people use similar systems in similar ways, their output can drift toward an average style that is articulate but difficult to distinguish by author.
His proposed remedy is editorial restraint. Writers should remove jargon that they would not say aloud, resist the urge to make every paragraph symmetrical and keep sentences that sound recognizably like their own speech. The advice treats generative AI as an editing aid whose suggestions still require human judgment, rather than as an automatic final-draft machine.
The essay is an opinion piece, not a controlled study of model output, and it does not attempt to measure how common these habits are. Its value lies instead in identifying the specific signals that readers increasingly associate with automated prose. The argument also points to a practical shift in online communication: as fluent text becomes cheap and plentiful, a distinctive voice may become more important, not less. For authors and companies using AI tools, the competitive question is no longer only whether a draft sounds intelligent. It is whether anyone can tell who is speaking.
