DEAD GIVEAWAYS THAT YOU USE CHAT GPT
CAN’T FOOL ME!
Hey, content creators, humans with wise, helpful, and soulful experiences to share, I see your ChatGPT cutting and pasting!
I’m not sure what I’m seeing exactly, but I know it when I see it and I feel it when I see it, and it makes me scroll away and unfollow. Can you not at least disguise your AI writings and rewritings? Because everything is becoming the same and it’s actually, literally mind-numbing.
- It’s not about this, it’s about that.
- The short clipped sentences. Full stop. Breathe.
- You’re not broken.
- It’s not laziness—it’s rest.
- No fluff.
- No this. No that. Just vibes.
- Honestly? Blah.
- The goal isn’t this thing. It’s some other thing.
The negative framing is what gets me furious. Stop saying what a thing isn’t and just use the real estate of space on the digital page to tell me what it is! Use metaphor! Simile! Examples! Give what it IS all of your attention and make it grab mine!
Maybe some of this kind of talking was how humans naturally wrote, and then AI stole our voices and recycled them back to us?
I think you all sound like men.
Even if not all men sound this way. Even if it’s not all being programmed entirely by men. But it reads like “male writing.”
It all reads like the writing style of The Desk Job Guy who quit his 40-hour-a-week mid-level-finance grind to bet on himself, to write an irreverent self-help book, and got very lucky (right place/right time, white place/white time) getting it published. His book, that could have been an email, is all about avoiding burnout and hustle culture while unconsciously instructing you how to hustle and burn out working for yourself.
He isn’t healed. He hasn’t done the work. He has no insight about anything, but he feels that he’s an expert because, of course he does, he’s a mediocre white straight cis man.
All it takes is two people—just one agent and one editor at a publishing company—who validate his expertise (in what again?) to get his words on the shelves by spring, and now this guy is in the mix.
By the time Work For Yourself Guy’s book is in your hands, he’s already outlining his second book about how his first book was bullshit because he hadn’t learned yet to take time off, and his new goal is to teach you about burnout.
He’s learning about meditation (from other white American men). He’s cold-plunging, and hot-sauna-ing, and breathing until he hyperventilates under the instruction of a man who abuses his family.
He still isn’t self-aware enough to realize that getting rich beyond his wildest dreams is why he can now take time off, even though he’s not really taking time off. He’s just manically rising and grinding and writing from White Lotus-ish hotel suites in strange-and-exotic-to-him locations. In his supercharged one hour of downtime per day, you can find him scrolling his phone, reading up on biohacking while getting a seaweed-wrap massage at the outdoor spa. He’s moments away from learning about the power of adding a splash of aloe vera juice to a smoothie.
His third book, the thing that will launch his new podcast, will be about supplements, powders, packets of gooey liposomal vitamins, the newest in hydration IV. Eventually he’ll be too successful to even write books, and wasn’t that the goal all along anyway?
He’ll deliver his increase-gut-health-in-men-to-red-pill-misogynist-right-wing-lonely-male-pipeline message from his YouTube channel the whole time, he’s never had a day off or gone to therapy. He’s the internet’s favorite guru because he tells it like it is (for other men just like him) yet sounds like a soulless husk while doing so.
Anyway, that’s what you all sound like.
I beg of you. When writing your social media posts, your Substacks, your newsletters, your episode description copy in my favorite podcast app, your website About page—be you. Be messy. Run it through something to check your grammar, if you have to. If you have the money, hire a human. If you don’t have time to write these things, stop and figure out how to get that time. Write a post about how you don’t have the time and let the internet help you figure it out.
I want you to sound like YOU. I need to hear from YOU. Please, don’t lose YOU. We need YOU. Somebody out there needs YOU. You’ve been influenced and trained, but it’s not too late to turn it all around.
Be un-influenceable.
Be untrainable.
xo, jen