Once upon a time, we built machines to make life easier.
Then we taught them to talk.
Then we gave them our tone, our rhythm, our wit … our voice and somewhere along the way, we started doubting our own.

At first, it felt like magic.
Type a sentence. Press a button.
Watch your thoughts return smoother, sharper, smarter.

It wasn’t cheating; it was optimization.

Why wrestle with words when an algorithm could make them sparkle?
But something shifted.

Under every thoughtful post, you now see it:

“Sounds AI.”

The new scarlet letter of the internet … three syllables that erase sincerity with a smirk.

We wanted machines to sound like us.
Now we accuse each other of being them.

Everyone’s using AI, it’s 2025, that’s the secret nobody admits.
Writers, strategists, students, politicians, poets.

We ask it to polish, reframe, clarify.
We give it our outlines, then call the final draft “ours”, and so we end up in the strangest paradox of modern life:
We all use AI, and we’re all suspicious of everyone else for doing it.

Every post feels immaculate.
Every sentence sounds curated.
Every human voice hums at the same clean, hollow frequency.

We’ve ironed out the flaws and with them, the fingerprints.

Not long ago, novelist Jenny Xie, author of Holding Pattern, admitted she’d used ChatGPT to help craft small fragments of her novel, just a few polished lines.
Readers praised her prose for being “too perfect,” then wondered aloud if it was too perfect
Her words were hers, yet suddenly suspect and she’s not alone.

Journalist Vauhini Vara used GPT-3 to write about her sister’s death in an essay called Ghosts.
Readers wept.
Then they found out a machine had helped, and the tears turned uneasy.
The essay hadn’t changed only the faith behind it had.

We’ve reached the uncanny valley of language:
Real emotion feels synthetic, and synthetic emotion feels real enough to sell.

We used to fear AI taking our jobs.
Now we fear it taking our authenticity.

Somewhere between Grammarly and ChatGPT, humanity forgot how to write badly.

We smoothed every edge.
We sterilized every spark.
We began to fear the mess, even though the mess was where our meaning lived.

Everything now sounds like a TED Talk translated by a robot trying not to offend anyone.

We no longer write to be understood.
We write to be approved.

We’ve turned expression into compliance and the result? A civilization that sounds articulate but feels anesthetized.

The New Impostor Syndrome

It’s no longer “Am I good enough?”
It’s “Am I real enough?”

We edit ourselves to sound “more professional,” “more structured,” “more confident”
meaning, more like the machine.

Our essays, our captions, our comments … all hum at the same tone:
coherent, polite, forgettable.

As linguist Emily Bender warned, language models imitate form without meaning.
The twist?
Now we imitate the imitation.

The next great rebellion won’t be about data.
It’ll be about voice.

The future belongs to those who still dare to sound human.

To write like they actually feel.
To use words that sweat, stumble, ache.
To say something so raw it makes the algorithm flinch.

Typos are punk rock now.
Hesitation is holy.
Honesty is the new luxury.

Because the machine can copy your words but it can’t fake your wounds.

We built machines to sound human.
But if we’re not careful, we’ll end up as their echoes flawless, measured, and hollow.

Maybe AI didn’t steal our voice after all….it just gave us a mirror and we didn’t like what we heard.