For most of my professional life, I was taught how to write “properly”.

I started in journalism in the late eighties. From there came business writing… nonfiction… books… columns… articles… endless editors (the best teachers I ever had… I’m looking at you, Jamie O’Meara and Jim Levine). Over time, you learn “the rules”. How to structure an argument… how to make a point… how to remove unnecessary words (still something I grapple with)… how to sound credible… how to write for a business audience. And, in the process, you learn what gets edited out. The slang… the strange turns of phrase… too much first person… anything that feels a little too conversational… a little too much like you.

Then AI showed up.

I’m going to state the saddest part right here: AI is really good at writing. In fact, I would argue that the mean of what AI produces is already better than how most people write. It’s clear… organized… grammatically correct… decently structured… and even professional. Give it enough context and direction, and it can produce a very competent article, memo, email or presentation (heck, I’ll often stare blankly at the screen trying to figure out if something is AI or the person who sent it). I’ve spent this week thinking about creativity, words and presentations… and last night while walking the dog, a stranger problem for those of us who have been writing professionally for decades came to me…

AI learned the rules we spent our careers learning and working on.

It’s been sitting with me because many thoughts were twirling around this topic during this week’s episode of Thinking With Mitch Joel with Roy Schwartz (co-founder of Axios and Axios HQ, and co-author of the new book, Simplify). Axios built an entire media platform around something they call Smart Brevity… a disciplined architecture for communicating clearly, quickly and effectively. My old business partner used to tell the team members: “Be brilliant… be brief… be gone.” In this conversation, Roy said something that initially sounds contradictory: Inside that structure of brevity and facts… they want personality. They want the journalist’s voice to come through. They want readers to know when they’re reading one writer versus another.

This feels like another proof-point for The Intimacy Economy.

For decades, much of business communication moved in the opposite direction. Words were polished and standardized. Comms departments created guidelines. Editors and PR folks cleaned things up. Leaders learned to sound like the message… a physical manifestation of the words. We created a language for business… and then taught the machines how to speak it. And, yes… I admit it… they’re exceptionally good at it.

So what happens when sounding professional is no longer particularly impressive (and, almost… boring)?

The obvious opportunity is to sound more like yourself. This isn’t a reaction to AI content. We’ve been talking about this since social media first took hold. Heck, one of the big ideas in my first book, Six Pixels of Separation, was “real interactions between real human beings.” That was back in 2009… and I had been writing about it since around 2003. Oddly, AI has been pushing me there much more aggressively lately. I’m writing more in first person. I’m using language and turns of phrase that an editor might once have cleaned up… I’m allowing more of how I actually speak into how I write. That’s core to my Intimacy Economy thinking as well… there’s a difference between communication that is technically excellent and communication that makes someone feel like you understand how they speak… how they think… and that you are actually talking to them.

Maybe AI will delta this… maybe it will force more leaders and brands to find a voice that actually feels like theirs?

AI makes it incredibly easy for every executive to produce a perfectly competent CEO note… every company to generate endless thought leadership that is SEO/AEO ready… every department to create polished communications at a scale we have never experienced before.

The danger is that all of it will be good… and all of it will sound the same.

Roy talks about human voice and character becoming even more important as the volume of AI-generated content explodes… I think he’s right. The next era of great communication will not be about abandoning structure or clarity. It feels like it will be about using all of these new things without allowing them to erase the person underneath.

Because when everyone can sound smart… sounding like someone may matter a whole lot more.