My Robotic Death

Right now, everyone is afraid that AI is going to flatten their voice and make them sound like everyone else. The threat is real, and it’s happening all around us.

Today, I want to tell you a little story about how my voice got flattened…only it didn’t happen recently. It happened almost 26 years ago, and I didn’t even need a machine to make me sound flat and unoriginal. I did it to myself years before any of these modern tools existed.

At the turn of the last century (yeah, that’s 2000, not 1900), I was a few years into a career pivot away from producing television and was working at a major multinational telecom company as a web content developer. A big part of my job at that time was to talk to super technical engineering types and translate that information into everything from marketing materials to technical and training manuals. It was business writing to the max, and I had gotten very, very good at writing things that sounded professional and business-y. I knew the right words to say when, and I could write the polished things that pleased my C-suite. I was also really good at saying the safe thing in the meeting and delivering the deck that ticked every box on the brief.

From the outside it looked like competence; I was good at my job, and the people around me weren’t complaining. I guess at the time I considered that a win, but at the same time, somewhere in there, I started to disappear.

This is what I’ve come to call the “robotic death,” and it didn’t arrive with any drama. For me, it was a slow shift. It started with me editing myself before I spoke, if only just slightly. Oh sure, I might say something to a colleague when the boss wasn’t around that was more consistent with how I really felt, but it felt a heck of a lot safer for me and for my career to build the safe thing. I mean, the safe version has never once got me in trouble. Eventually, I took the safe path enough times that it stopped being a choice. It became my voice. And suddenly, I was sitting in rooms in a role, not as a person. I had become the deliverable.

The work got duller, and I got smaller, but the strange part was that nobody could see it, not even me. My work was consistent, polished, and accurate, and it passed every inspection. Things got approved, moved up the chain, and got integrated into the whole. My performance reviews were stellar. On the surface, it seemed like I had it all figured out.

That’s the trap.

I was pretty successful working in the telecom world, but deep down I was so dissatisfied. I didn’t figure it out then, and eventually I moved on from that job.

A few years later, I discovered blogging, and the opportunity became pretty apparent. I had a place now where I could take risks. Through this very blog, I explored what it would look like to take the less safe road and got more raw, more real. I told my own stories, and it allowed me to start to get used to the idea of being vulnerable in public. Then, I braced for the sky to fall. To my utter surprise, people didn’t recoil; they actually leaned in. It turned out that I had been doing myself a great disservice by playing it safe.

The problem was never that I couldn’t find the words; after all, I am a storyteller. The problem when I worked that high-tech job was that I was afraid of doing something different for fear of being wrong or embarrassing myself, and my work became very beige. Sure, I could churn out work that was passable, but it really wasn’t connecting with anyone. Going robotic is not a skillset failure. It’s fear wearing business-casual attire.

Which brings me back to the AI panic that is prolific these days, because I think people have the threat backwards. If you feel like a function right now, it’s possible that AI didn’t do that to you. The machines have just turned up the volume on a sameness that has been developing for a long time. I think we’ve been outsourcing our own voices to the safe version for a very long time; it’s just that AI is simply the most efficient tool we’ve ever invented for sounding like everyone else.

The good news is the cure hasn’t changed at all. There will never be a better tool, framework, or set of words that is going to solve the problem of being robotic. What is going to continue to shine are the real stories (of you, your organization, or your business), told with craft and a good chunk of courage. That was true before the internet, it was true through my own robotic years, and it’s definitely true now.

These days I spend a lot of time in rooms drawing the true story out of people who’ve been going or have gone exactly where I went. Watching someone go from robotic to realizing that the story is and will always be the thing never gets old.

If you’ve felt yourself going robotic, I want you to hear this clearly: this is not the end of anything. It’s actually the most fixable problem I know.

You don’t need the words that AI will create for you. You need to stop being afraid of the words you’re writing that are already true.