Stop telling AI to "sound like me"

2 min read Original article ↗

Most AI writing advice starts off simply wrong:

5 ways to make AI sound like you
5 ways to make AI sound like you

The above said to an AI that has never read you, that is usually slop.

You can tell it to write like a famous writer. Maybe that helps a little, but what you get is the average of how the training set imitates them. Not them, not you either.

Here is the interesting question: what changes when the model already knows or learns how you write before it generates a single word?

I ran an experiment using the same brief and the same LLM model. The brief was simple: write an essay opening on “AI is computation.”

On the left, the model writes with no profile. On the right, it writes with a voice profile extracted from Gabriel Pickard’s writing, with Gabriel’s permission ofc.

The difference is visible in the first sentence.

The no-profile version starts like a competent explainer:

There is a temptation to describe modern AI as if it were mostly a new kind of text interface...

That is clear, maybe even useful. It is the default register of a good frontier model: define the topic, frame the issue, proceed carefully.

The profile-guided version starts differently:

There is a framing of large language models that treats them as oracles...

That opening already has a writer inside it. It moves differently, names the conventional frame, turns it into a mechanism, and sets up a contrarian landing. It does not just use different words like a Humanizer.

That is the part people miss when they talk about AI writing style.

Voice is not tone or vocabulary, it is not sprinkling in favorite phrases. It is structural: how you open, how you pivot, where you put pressure, what kind of claim you are willing to make first, how you move from abstraction to example and back. A voice profile gives the model those patterns before generation begins.

A prompt tells the model what to do, a profile tells it who is doing the writing.

Full comparison:

https://usenoren.ai/sample-voice-profile#generation

Disclosure: this post was written with my Noren voice profile. If it sounds like me, that’s the experiment working. Subscribe if you want more.

Until next time.

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