As a native English speaker working in the Brussels bubble, I see more ways to tweak my mother tongue than there are municipalities in Belgium.
Misplaced punctuation. Run-on sentences. Too many—or not enough—articles.
It’s not a criticism—it’s part of what makes this town so unique.
But lately, everyone is blending into the same formulaic monotone. The one you’re reading now.
No individuality. No creativity. Just… the same AI slop.
Honestly? I’m getting really tired of reading the same voice in every post. It feels like a zombie outbreak taking over the internet.
I’m begging you all to stop.
Some of the markers of AI are obvious. Things we all know to look for.
Em dashes. Rule of three. Bolded sentence fragments for impact.
Asking myself a question? Answering it, too.
But this isn’t really how people wrote before, and it’s not really how people write now either. We’ve all become handicapped.
Brussels monotone: A touch of unreality
No, I did not use ChatGPT to write this. It’s just incredibly easy to sit back and let the infection take over. The Voice is so loud, so simple, and so pervasive that it’s like writing on rails. It can be difficult to resist.
As I try desperately to retain my singularity, I can feel myself being dragged down by the horde while everyone seems to synthesize into a robotic monotone.
Why does this Brussels-bubble EU influencer sound just like the wholesome animal content in my Instagram feed? Why does this inspirational “suggested post” about juggling work and family in Berlin sound exactly like my old high school classmate who now posts about scrum and project management in his very specific workplace? Is someone writing all of this content in between analysis of Andor and press releases for briefly famous internet stars?
Even worse: All of the above also sound exactly like the “insightful” promotional DMs that I’m getting from someone I met in person at a conference, who is ironically trying to market his AI insights to me.
In January, I found myself chatting on Bumble with a real woman – we did eventually meet – who was mixing her organic messages with clever, flirty one-liners featuring emojis and uncharacteristically perfect spelling and grammar.
I can’t take it anymore. Am I the Omega Man? Am I the Last Man on Earth? Am I… Legend?
It’s not just about using AI—it’s about laziness.
There is something deeply sick and somewhat offensive to me about outsourcing our genuine (albeit digitized) human interactions to robots.
I can’t help but feel a bit betrayed when I find myself corresponding, with my own eyes and brain, with someone’s artificial assistant. Clearly one of us is more invested in this interaction than the other.
Further, it feels like the prevalence of the Voice has started to bleed back into peoples’ genuine writing style. We’re all influenced by what we’re exposed to, and I find it so tragic that even organic content is starting to borrow from ChatGPT’s overused constructions.
ChatGPT is an incredibly powerful tool with so many applications; I’m not here to expound on them, but I’m absolutely not knocking the platform. I use it myself and it’s saved me time and given me plenty of useful feedback for personal and professional projects.
I just think we can hold ourselves to a higher standard than feeding a quick prompt and then copy-pasting whatever it spits back at us.
The Voice is spread too far and wide. And if you’re using AI to write and I can’t tell, great! You’re doing something right. You’re applying your own style, thoughts and voice with the help of a handy cartoon paperclip.
I also understand that it helps native and non-native speakers alike to polish their work, and again, I’m fully supportive and encouraging of that practice. And look, I get the appeal:
Short, punctuated sentence fragments imply gravity. Weight. A bolder way of writing.
A corrective antithesis isn’t just a construction. It can be useful to laser-focus your point and preempt misinterpretation.
And the em dashes—a clear, simple way to connect two thoughts. Or—if you need to add a caveat—to make exceptions.
The constant questions? They mimic verbal intonation choices that engage audiences, but become a crutch to end lists of three, and frankly, don’t read very well.
Every post has a nice summary at the end, just in case. It’s a closing line worthy of a middle school essay that tries to elevate a mundane observation into a grand universal truth.
These are totally fine stylistic choices in their own right. Just, please, give me some humanity!
Be the legend, not the zombie
Give me spelling mistakes, give me improper punctuation, let me see that comma splice that’s driven me up the wall for ages. For the love of God, I would applaud a misused word here and there.
Give me long, run-on, Bret-Easton-Ellis-style sentences; extensive punctuation-filled paragraphs stretching a single thought or premise as far as you can without breaking, those that would take up an entire page of a book and keep your eyes on the edge of every word as you search for a point that you can take away with you—sentences that seem constructed only to mock the concept of a full stop and threaten you with the thought that, if you don’t pay close enough attention, you may have to wind yourself up and start back over at the beginning to make sense of the whole thing (if you don’t give up and scroll onward to whatever you’ve cued up next), but likewise seem to promise that if you make it to the end in one piece, it’ll all still make sense somehow.
Give me the occasional extra article from a French speaker or, inversely, a missing article from someone further east. The sometimes-odd construction of German elbowing its way into an English text. Give me two examples, or four or five, to punctuate your point, instead of an overly punctuated list of three.
Truthfully, I’ll never complain about perfect spelling and grammar, and I’m not asking you to abandon AI. I’m just asking you to put in a little more effort. Write your email and ask ChatGPT for advice. Ask for some joke ideas, but put the words together yourself. At the very least, look for the common constructions I’ve replicated here and undo them!
Overall, what should you do instead? Don’t listen to me—or anyone. Not when it comes to style. It’s up to you to figure it out yourself. Please, above all, do not listen to the robot for that. As the artistic world has been screaming for years, creativity and humanity are one thing that AI can’t replace.
I don’t know the best way forward, but I think we all benefit when we’re writing as ourselves. Rather than claim to know the answer, I’ll give you the best—or most common—piece of advice that language models receive: “make it better.”
