Don’t Let AI Flatten Your Voice
Over-compressed songs hurt your ears—over-generated content hurts your brain
Have you ever noticed how some songs sound loud but strangely lifeless? That’s not just your imagination – it’s the result of over-compression, a trick sound engineers use to make music louder, but at a cost to both quality and, surprisingly, your ears. Compression “squishes” music: loud parts become quieter, quiet parts louder, making everything sound equally loud. This boosts punchiness on small speakers, but strips away nuance and, as new research suggests, may even harm your hearing.
Why am I telling you this? Yes, it’s a bit of a PSA (public service announcement) – but no, this post isn’t about music; it is about AI. Let me explain…
Just as compression flattens music, the flood of AI-generated content flattens our online conversations. The composer Claude Debussy called music the space between the notes. What’s true for music is true for content in general. And we are drowning in AI-generated slop – the text equivalent of compressed music.
Just take a look at your LinkedIn timeline – I am positively sick and tired of the telltale AI-generated post: They are all 1,000 to 1,500 characters long, broken into individual paragraphs after one or two sentences, full of emojis, stuffed with oddly specific tags, have weirdly bolded text (and em-dashes galore), and end with an engagement-creating question. A good 70% of my LinkedIn timeline is now filled with this stuff – and all it tells me is that the person posting this doesn’t care, they have nothing to say, and they are doing whatever they are doing just for the clicks.
True, engaging writing is the space between the sentences. The original thought conveyed in your voice. Warts and all.
Nobody wants or needs to listen to ChatGPT’s thoughts on whatever it is you think is important – have something to say? Say it. Next time you write, don’t flatten your voice. Embrace the pauses, the quirks, the real opinions. That’s what makes you and your content worth reading.
LinkedIn is definitely a fun house mirror world of the same algorithmically generated prose, tone, cadence, and "flair". It is now a robotic graveyard of career fan fiction.
As LinkedIn is the only social media where I've ever (begrudgingly) succumbed to entrusting it with my real identity (I know.... I was called paranoid until 2018 and prescient thereafter), I've had to resist the urge of responding with "bleep derp whizz ping" to make a point.
One of my best friends uses AI as a content filter, asking a chatbot if a chatbot could write his proposed post. If so, and if he's merely adding more slop, he won't bother posting it.