Personal brand ·
The great flattening: why your whole industry is starting to sound the same
When a factory turns out a thousand identical mugs, none of them is worth much. What people pay for is the potter's piece, the one with the slightly crooked handle and a glaze that is not repeated anywhere else. Something very similar is happening to professional content, and at a dizzying speed.
You open LinkedIn and half a dozen posts in a row look cast from the same mould: the same hook in the first line, the same list of three points, the same closing question to "spark conversation". Two years ago you could almost hear the voice of whoever was writing. Today it is hard to tell one person from another, and the whole feed drifts towards the same middle point, soft and forgettable.
Let us call it the great flattening. This is written by someone who earns a living helping people sound like themselves, so you already know which side I am on. In the next few lines you will see why your whole industry is starting to talk the same way, what staying in that pile costs you, and which parts of you no machine is capable of flattening.
By Mario Pérez
Why everything comes out of the same mould
Let us start with the mechanics, because it helps not to take it personally. A language model works by calculating the most probable thing to come after each word. By design it pulls towards the centre, towards the expected, towards the average answer of everything it has read. When you ask it for a "professional and warm" post, it hands you back the average of millions of professional and warm posts.
The problem appears when you multiply. Your neighbour in the industry asks the same tool the same thing you did, with a prompt copied from the same viral thread, and receives a sibling of your version. A hundred people doing that at once produce a hundred texts that overlap: the same analogies, the same "I failed, I learned, let me teach you" arc, the same rhythm of short sentences. The machine is not to blame for anything, it simply does its job. The average is the natural by-product of all of us drinking from the same well.
And here is the uncomfortable detail: the reader has already learned to smell that average from a distance, and disconnects before reading you.
Nobody decides it and it happens anyway
If the flattening were only laziness, it would be fixed by asking people to try harder. The matter is more stubborn, because three forces push it at once with nobody orchestrating them.
The first is convenience. Having a correct draft in ten seconds is an enormous temptation when you are short on time, and almost nobody then sits down to break it apart and put their own voice in. The second is the herd effect: as soon as a format works, it gets copied to exhaustion, and the tool that replicates it is one click away. The third is fear of failing, which pushes people to take shelter in what has already worked for others rather than risking something personal.
Put them together and you have a spiral. The more average content gets published, the more the reader's eye grows used to that register, and the stranger it looks to step outside it. That is how a whole industry ends up speaking in a borrowed voice nobody consciously chose.
The expensive part of sounding like everyone else
None of this would matter much if it did not cost money and opportunities, but it costs both. What sounds like everything else is forgotten just as fast. The reader swipes past your post the way they swipe past fifty other clones and, ten seconds later, does not remember you signed it.
That forgetting has a price. A personal brand serves one very specific purpose: that when somebody has a problem of the kind you solve, your name is the first that comes to mind. If your content is interchangeable with your competitors', you are asking your audience for an act of memory they are not going to make.
And there is a cost in trust. When a text smells of a template, the reader senses there was little effort behind it and marks down what your word is worth. With somebody who commits and says something concrete the opposite happens: even when they contradict you, you notice a person is thinking, and that counts.
What the average never reaches
Now for the good news, which is the reason I sat down to write this. You have three things the average will never reach, because they do not come from calculating the probable.
The first is your judgement: the opinion you hold after years getting your hands dirty in your craft, with its nuances and its exceptions, lives in your head and in no corpus on the internet. The second is your experience: the exact anecdote, the odd client, the mistake that cost you dearly and what you took from it. That was lived, which is why no machine invents it. The third is your taste, that filter for what strikes you as elegant and what strikes you as tacky, which is what turns a pile of data into a recognisable voice.
The tool gives you the clay. Judgement, experience and taste are the hands that shape it.
How to write with relief without giving up AI
For the record, the tools are not the enemy. I use them every day. The idea is putting them where they pay off, as assistants at your service. These four habits keep the flattening from dragging me along.
- Always start from an idea of your own. Decide what you want to say and why you in particular before opening any tool. Whoever starts from emptiness gets the average handed back.
- Put in a detail only you could contribute: a name, a figure, an exact moment. That anchors the text to your life and pulls it out of the average in one stroke.
- Take a position. Say what you would do in that situation even if it grates on somebody. A text that commits gets remembered. One that pleases everybody evaporates.
- Read it out loud before publishing and strike out any sentence you would never say in a conversation. That "this does not sound like me" is the best proofreader you have.
The odd is worth more now
Let me close with the reading that reconciles me to this whole mess. The flatter the world gets, the more anyone who keeps some relief stands out. If your whole industry converges on a soft register, the person who writes with judgement, with experience and with a voice of their own becomes odd, and odd catches the eye.
Five years ago, sounding like yourself was a pleasant advantage. Today, with the whole feed drifting towards the average, it is one of the few things that genuinely separates you from the pile. The paradox has its charm: it has never been so easy to produce something correct, and for exactly that reason it has never been worth so much to produce something that sounds like a specific person. That person can be you, the day you refuse to let yourself be flattened.