I’ve been thinking a lot about authorial voice and style lately, the thing that makes each person’s writing unique.

Growing up, I was a voracious reader, in part because my parents had a rule that we could only stay up late if we were reading quietly in bed. I devoured novels, history books, fantasy books and video game manuals.

Each one told a different story in a literal sense, but they also told a different story in the voice that the story was told in. The grandness of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings was entirely different to the slang of Bridget Jones’s Diary. The Financial Times read nothing like the picture book given to us in kindergarten.

I learnt to love authors for who they were, through the unique voice they spoke in in their prose.

When I was young, I thought this voice idea was limited to just authors. But as I grew up I realized that everyone had a unique voice. My mum would write shopping lists in a different way than my dad would. My friends from one culture would use different words to another friend, even when speaking the same language.

When I traveled Europe, this became even more obvious. I learnt that English is spoken by more people as a second language than as a first, and that those other voices are starting to shape the new words we use as native speakers. And that they have always done so. There are so many borrowed words in English, the French fiance and beau (of beautiful), the German kindergarten.

From 2010 – 2022, we were celebrating the “own voices” movement, the idea that people from different cultures should speak in their own way, with their own quirks. Europeans speaking English were encouraged to put their spin on it, as were those speaking it in Asia or South America.

Now AI, along with so many other things, is stealing our voices.

The friends who used to have unique words no longer use them. The quirky slang an influencer once used to use is gone. The syntax, word choice, pacing, sentence length and paragraph structure of the vast majority of people I follow online has morphed into a grey blob on a grey sea.

The people behind the screen have been replaced by the mono voice. The AI voice. It’s there in the emdashes and the not X, but Y’s. It’s there in the delves and the additionally’s. It’s there in the feel and the texture and the tone of what they say. The cliched ideas. The staccato rhythm. It’s there in the bland detachment, the unemotionality, the cold logic.

At first, I thought this AI voice was new. Then I realized I had seen it before.

At the end of university, at the cusp of real adulthood, we were introduced to this voice, long before the advent of mass AI generation. When writing cover letters, essays and corporate prose we were taught the rules of rigid structures. Topic sentences. Buzzwords. We began to write towards keywords so that machines would pick us up from piles, not realising that we were beginning to sound like the machines.

AI has accelerated this trend, making us all sound more robotic and machine-like, with everyone speaking loudly and no one saying a word with their own tongue.

The people who once cared about the Own Voices movement have abandoned it too. I see educators encouraging foreigners to use ChatGPT to blend in, as if blending in isn’t the expulsion of language and culture, as if English ever had one right answer, as if Shakespeare wasn’t the first writer to use table as a verb, as if the evolution of language is already over.

There is no ‘right’ way to use English. There is no perfect grammar or perfect word. Language is not about perfection, it is about communication and evolution, the idea that each of us has a voice to share, to contribute, and to change the way our culture operates.

Our bosses now want us to blend in too with the AI voice, to stop speaking, to drift quietly into the grey. They want us to use the machine to all sound the same, to write quickly and think less, to be less, to make less sound, to have no voice.

The question is…

Will you let your voice disappear too?