How not to sound like ChatGPT 🦜

Keep your own voice when using AI

Aug 20, 2025

Updated August 2026: I’ve refreshed this guide after another year of working with ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini every day.

AI repeats. You create. *Illustration: ImageFX/MM*

It’s getting very easy to disappear into a sea of AI writing. Give ChatGPT or Claude a prompt about hiring, pricing or fundraising and it’ll give you something perfectly usable.

The problem starts when you stop putting yourself back into the draft. You could swap your name for someone else’s and very little would change. Keep publishing drafts like that and people running completely different businesses start writing in the same polished voice.

I’ve spent more than twenty years writing and editing, and I now use AI almost every day. I’ve stopped caring much about catching one fashionable AI word because those giveaways change. I care far more about whether the finished draft sounds like something I would actually say.

If I wouldn’t have written the sentence myself, it isn’t finished.👇🏻

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The dead giveaways

The Max Planck Institute analysed over 740,000 hours of academic talks, YouTube videos and podcasts. They found that since ChatGPT’s release, words like delve, meticulous, adept, realm, and swift have surged by as much as 51%.

Very few people will stop halfway through and decide your writing was generated by AI. They’ll leave with a much simpler feeling that something didn’t quite sound like you. By then you’ve already lost them.

These are the patterns I notice most, and I’ve caught myself leaving plenty of them in early AI drafts👇🏻

1️⃣ The parallel/contrast/mirror structure problem

If your sentences keep falling into “It’s not just X, it’s Y”, you’re probably leaving the AI draft untouched. Real people don’t naturally write like that all the time.

2️⃣ The em-dash obsession

Yes, I’ve been guilty of this too. ChatGPT leans heavily on em-dashes (that’s this long line —) to join ideas together. One or two can work, but a wall of them screams AI.

3️⃣ The vocabulary drift

Words like prowess, tapestry, delve, realm, and adept aren’t bad words. They become a giveaway when they start appearing in writing from people who’d never used them before ChatGPT arrived.

4️⃣ Explaining everything

Phrases like “let’s unpack”, “no fluff” and “at the end of the day” have become AI defaults. They fill space without saying very much, which is usually reason enough to delete them.

5️⃣ Perfect rhythm

AI likes paragraphs that all feel the same length, with neatly balanced sentences. It likes explaining every idea until there’s nothing left for the reader to work out. Real writing isn’t that tidy.

Put yourself back into the draft

Three things have helped me more than anything else:

Treat it as a first draft. ChatGPT is a good place to start. It shouldn’t be where you stop. I go through every draft looking for the patterns we just covered before I change anything else. AI slop usually starts when the first draft gets mistaken for the finished one.
Use voice dictation. Speaking forces me to use words I’d naturally choose in conversation. I still edit every draft, but it starts much closer to my own voice than a carefully written prompt.
Let your opinion survive the edit. You don’t need every sentence to be perfect. The occasional rough edge reminds people there’s a person behind the words.

How I edit an AI draft

I don’t throw an AI draft away and start again. I edit it the same way I’d edit a guest article or one of my own early drafts.

The first pass is for the obvious giveaways and taking myself back out of autopilot. That’s where I usually find the patterns, the repeated sentence shapes and the phrases I’d never naturally use.

Take a founder writing about pricing. Give ten people the same broad prompt and you’ll get ten drafts saying much the same thing. The difference only starts to show when someone puts their own view back into it, along with the words they’d actually use.

The second is where I start rewriting sentences until they sound like something I’d naturally say. By the end, whole paragraphs have usually disappeared and new ones have taken their place.

That’s also why I’m not interested in prompts that promise “human” writing. The edit is where your voice comes back. AI can help with the first draft. It still can’t tell you whether the finished version sounds like you.

The edit is where the draft becomes yours.

Words that give you away

You can’t prompt your way out of this. You can tell ChatGPT “don’t use delve” or “avoid em-dashes,” but the fingerprints slip back in. The patterns run much deeper than individual words.

The fix comes later, when you read the draft as yourself instead of the person who wrote the prompt.

Delve → look into, explore, break down
Realm → space, field, world, industry
Prowess → skill, ability, strength
Tapestry → mix, web, mess, backdrop
Adept → good at, skilled, sharp
At the end of the day → in reality, bottom line, the truth is
Let’s unpack → let’s break this down, here’s what matters
No fluff → straightforward, cut to it, here’s the point
Just scratching the surface → barely started, only the basics
A game-changer → a big shift, a real move, it changed things
Paving the way → opening doors, making room, setting things up
Harnessing the power of → using, applying, putting to work
Unleashing potential → developing, building, making the most of

Flaws are proof of life

AI will keep getting better, and the obvious giveaways will keep changing.

That makes your own judgement more important, because the final draft still needs to sound like something you would actually say rather than something the model happened to produce.

I’ve found the simplest test is still the best one: if I wouldn’t have written the sentence myself, it isn’t finished.

The short version

Can you make ChatGPT sound like you?

Yes, but it usually happens during editing rather than prompting. AI can produce a strong first draft, but your voice comes from the decisions you make afterwards.