I have labeled this summer the summer of reset. A good, hard look at what I want to focus on moving forward. More Substacks? Restart my podcast? Definitely more time on my novel. This has all been inspired by a post by Maria Shriver.
Part of this process has been looking at my online persona, from my website to my LinkedIn profile. So when I was working on refreshing my bio this week, I was met with this offer.
Enhance my profile with AI. All I needed to do was upgrade to premium.
I wasn’t buying it. But then why would I? Why would I think AI can do a better job than I can? Why would I think AI knows my distinct and very human voice better than I do?
I ignored it as I do every time I see that little prompt at the bottom of a post that suggests I “enhance my post.”
Unfortunately, too many are taking that bait and opting for AI over themselves. It’s painfully obvious.
The posts are too long
I am not sure who thinks anyone is reading the laundry list of the takeaways said person got from the talk they heard at the last event they attended. Unless it is really, really interesting and engaging. Spoiler alert – they’re generally not.
If you’re lucky, they make it to the end of the first paragraph, at which point the reader scrolls on in search of something that sounds human.
The language is repetitive
Here’s the twist.
What I walked away with.
They didn’t stop there.
The takeaway that really landed.
A masterclass in (fill in the blank).
No one talks like that. The point of sharing on LinkedIn is to build your personal brand, but if you sound like everyone else, you’re not building anything.
They swim in the sea of sameness
Marketing, whether that brand is a product, service, or you, is about differentiating yourself. AI literacy is an important career skill to hone. But sounding like AI is not proving you’re AI literate. It’s not engaging. It sounds the same as everyone else sounds.
It’s demonstrating you aren’t thinking for yourself.
They’re boring
Boring did not work when we were living in a world limited to three network channels, radio, and print. It certainly does not work in today’s crowded environment, especially when you’re posting on a platform whose primary purpose is to network, develop your thought leadership, and/or get you a job.
If you sound robotic, a robot can and will do your job.
They don’t sound human
When I first published Crafting Your Pitch, A Storytelling Framework, one of my colleagues told me the book sounded exactly like me. Candid. To the point. A little humor mixed in. I couldn’t have been more pleased. That was what I wanted. I did not want to write another book on storytelling and pitching that sounded like the rest. I wanted it to sound like me. Human.
Posts created with AI rarely do.
AI wants to think and write for us
LinkedIn is not alone with its AI suggestions. Keynote now asks me if I want to generate presenter notes from my decks. Apparently, they think they know better than I do what I want to say.
Zoom has an AI companion that wants to summarize meeting notes instead of me deciding what was and was not important to remember. Or perhaps they’re just giving me license to turn off my camera and pretend I’m in attendance when I’m actually doing the laundry.
Meta lists what they consider the most relevant comments on any post first. Google search, once a trusted source, now incorporates AI summaries into almost every search.
They, along with every other tech company, want to dictate conclusions they have drawn instead of allowing me to reach them myself.
AI is not all bad. Writing and thinking for us is.
There will be a lot of good that comes from AI; however, letting AI control the narrative instead of a human is not one of them. Especially when it comes to our careers and building our personal brands.
If you’re not able to critically think and write a sentence reflecting your expertise and perspective without the help of AI, don’t be too surprised when you don’t get a call back from that connection you were trying to make or the job interview you were hoping to land.
No matter how hard the tech companies try, being human still matters. It has since the beginning of time. Showcase it. On LinkedIn and off.
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