I Don’t Write Like GenAI. GenAI Writes Like Me

As a reluctant victim and guilty beneficiary of late-stage capitalism, I decided to have a quarter-life crisis by looking for something “more” in my “life”.

Since the best way to find meaning in life is by shitposting on the Internet (creative writing) and screaming into the void (finding one’s passion), I’ve been sharing my essays for external validation.

A common response is that my essays are written by GenAI.

At first, I trembled with indignance. As an aspiring Writer™, I spend time crafting each essay. Why do people assume it’s AI slop?

Why can’t it be my slop?

Then I started re-reading my essays. The top-down structure. The logical flow. The cold, clinical tone. I finally understood where they were coming from. But…

They’re wrong.

I don’t write like GenAI.

GenAI writes like me.

As a management consultant, everything I write is corporate: inane and uninspired, dedicated to maximizing revenue, minimizing cost and generating shareholder value.

Corporate communication isn’t for people - it’s for businesses. Its purpose isn’t to inspire, but to clarify. It is the most effective tool ever invented for eliminating ambiguity, and on a good day, any trace of being human.

It’s the language of the gods.

GenAI isn’t being unoriginal, robotic or derivative.

It’s just speaking corporate to you.

Just like me.

So what if my writing lacks any identifiable human emotion that resonates with the subjective lived experiences of other people? That my personality, creativity and soul have been completely crushed by the overwhelming pressure of laissez faire capitalism and its insatiable hunger for more?

Corporate writing is the best kind of writing.

It’s efficient.

Why waste time say lot word when few word do trick?

I don’t care if people think I use GenAI to write.

I don’t care.

It’s not my fault my writing is clear and concise, or that it uses a hierarchical structure to logically group ideas to improve clarity, readability and information retention.

I have given up too much to give up writing like this.

It’s just better.

Of course I sound like GenAI.

I can’t help it.

I’m hallucinating when I tell a client we’re doing “hypothesis-driven analysis” when we don’t have data.

I’m prompt engineering when I ask Senior Partners precisely calibrated questions so they don’t send me down a rabbit-hole that annihilates my entire weekend.

In fact, let’s go further by taking a step back. Isn’t consulting the original GenAI? A human + Google in a trenchcoat creating sentences like actioning low-hanging fruit by leveraging synergies from rationalizing organizational complexity through right shoring, all while creating the most beautiful PowerPoint slides known to man?

Typing those buzzwords gave me a dopamine hit because I associate them with profit

Admittedly, I started writing to find a creative outlet.

A way to express myself.

But then I started optimizing all fun and enjoyment out of it, focusing on subscriber growth, email opens and conversion rate.

I couldn’t help but build a go-to-market strategy, as if I was going to break free from consulting’s golden handcuffs and live a full, fulfilled life doing what I love.

My happiness doesn’t matter.

The only objective is to produce the most entertaining piece of writing for my readers, who don’t care how the sausage is made, as long as it tastes good.

I don’t need to find my passion or confront my spiraling existential crisis that is consuming every moment of my life. It’s a waste of time to process trauma from 5 years of interesting, high-impact work that is meaningless.

Being vulnerable is not efficient.

If it were, I would actually have to think about the fact that I’m working on GenAI prompts that would eventually make my own job redundant.

I would have to come to terms that my innocent, genuine, creative form of self-expression is mistaken for Artificial Intelligence; no better than soulless, inhuman algorithms.

Chat, am I cooked?