Your Brand Has a Voice. AI Is Erasing It.
AI raised the floor of writing and lowered the ceiling. It made everyone competent and no one memorable.
For the first time, anyone can produce a clean, competent piece of writing in seconds. The email, the announcement, the social post, the newsletter, all of it can be generated, polished and scheduled before you have finished your coffee. On paper this is a gift, especially for teams that were never staffed for the volume of communication the world now expects. In practice something is off, and it took me a while to name it.
AI raised the floor of writing and quietly lowered the ceiling. The floor is higher because the typos and the clumsy structure are mostly gone, and almost anything you generate will read as acceptable. The ceiling is lower because acceptable is now everywhere, and the things that used to make a piece of communication stand out, a voice, a point of view, a turn of phrase that only one person would have used, are exactly the things these tools smooth away.
I have spent twenty years in and around communications, from running it at Wamda to building impact campaigns to overseeing the digital voice of an organization like twofour54 in two languages. The one thing that experience teaches you is that the job of a message was never to be well-written. It was to be believed.