Why So Much AI Writing Sounds the Same,and What I Am Doing About Mine

A lot of what I read online lately sounds like it was written by the same very polite person. Nicolas Cole explained why on a podcast this week, and his answer changed how I plan to spend my time.

Same models, same data, same answer

Cole has ghostwritten for founders and executives for about a decade, and he was on Greg Isenberg's startup podcast this week. His explanation is simple. Everyone is using the same models, trained on the same data, and the model has no idea which side of an argument you're on, so it reaches for whatever most people say.

His example is money. Ask a model to write about personal finance and it will tell your readers to skip the $3 coffee and put the savings in an index fund. Plenty of people in personal finance would argue the opposite. The model isn't wrong, exactly. It just picked the side it hears most often, because nobody told it which one you're on.

He calls the result commodity content, and his test for it is almost insultingly simple: look at the pronouns. Writing that tells you what you should do leans commodity, while writing about what I did leans mine. (I've written my share of "you should" posts, so that one landed a little close to home.)

Sounding like me was never the hard part

Tools that learn to copy your voice already exist. Jasper's blog-writing page says it plainly: "Let AI analyze your content's tone of voice, then set tone and formatting rules so Jasper's writing always sounds like you."

Cole's view is that voice matters less than people think. He tells a story about a client who sent a piece back furious because it did not sound like him. Cole did not rewrite it. He added two or three sentences that cited the New York Times and Harvard Business Review, because that client always argued from studies, and changed about 1% of it. The client said it sounded just like him. By Cole's estimate, a typical piece is 80% commodity groupings of words anyway.

So matching my voice is the easy half. Knowing what I think is the part a model cannot supply.

What a ghostwriter actually does

His fix is older than AI. The way Cole describes it, a good ghostwriter barely invents anything. They take what the client has already said, in a book or a recorded meeting, and stitch it into something new, so it's the client's ideas in their own words, just moved around. He calls that raw material approved language: sentences the client has already said and stands behind.

What he wants from AI is the same deal, and he put it better than I can: "the robots repeating me."

What I built today

So today I built the first piece of that for myself. It holds every sentence I've published on LinkedIn (992 of them, across 23 posts), each tagged with the post it came from. Next to that sits a short list of the 20 positions I've actually taken in public, each one tied to the line where I said it. When I start something new, it searches those for the topic and starts from my lines.

If something needs an opinion I've never said out loud, the rule is that it stops and asks me, which is decent advice for people too.

Cole has a version of this for companies, too: one person paid to think deeply about the industry and write it down, with the rest of the marketing team remixing from that library. His words: "one smart person could build the entire digital brain." The library is the asset. The model is the tool that reuses it.

The part no ghostwriter can do

No ghostwriter can form the opinion for me, human or not. If I haven't done the hard thinking, there's nothing for anyone to repeat. Cole put the temptation well: most people want to skip the step of thinking and let the model do it, and he called that shortcut "the longer road in disguise."

The typing got cheap. Checking it didn't, and working out what I actually think hasn't gotten any cheaper at all.

Why I think commodity writing is heading to zero

That's the part of Cole's argument I agree with most, even though it sounds old-fashioned. When a model can turn out an endless amount of text in seconds, it's still worth sitting down to think something through and write it myself, because those are the sentences a ghostwriter has to work with. Skip that and all it can hand back is commodity.

Cole is more generous than I am here. He says commodity content still has value, particularly for beginners, who often need the basic version more than anything else. I'd go a step further than he does: when anyone can produce the basic version in seconds, I think commodity writing is on its way to being worth nothing.

What I'm changing

So I'm changing how I spend my time. I'm going to read and write something of my own every day, and the model's job is ghostwriter and proofreader. It doesn't get to be the author.

What's something you believe about your work that the average answer gets wrong?