This Post Contains 34% Less Slop Than the Original.

I'm a terrible LinkedIn user. I use it in fits and spurts, but here I am again, writing like I did a few years ago. Except everything has changed.

Today, Claude is my researcher, my editor and occasionally my ghostwriter. It’s great. The problem? AI is also great at killing voice. It’s neutral, it’s safe, it’s perfectly constructed.

It’s boring AF.

Voice comes from lived experience. The specific, the opinionated, the a-little-too-honest. Jasmine Sun put it well in the Atlantic: the chatbot that won't make you money is the one that's a weirdo. The labs train that out. This is fine for a lot of tasks. Except anything worth reading.

From a LinkedIn perspective, does it matter? Maybe not. Some argue the math of AI-generated content gives the auto-poster a leg-up in engagement.

But it matters for me. I'm not optimizing for likes (many are agents anyway). I want to build a brand that sounds like someone. I'm a Gen Xer and a survivor of the dot com era. I remember when smoking was OK in bars.

Rough around the edges is a feature, not a bug.

So I’m learning to write like I approach AI coding: I’m at the wheel. I wrote this post from top to bottom in 20 minutes. It was sloppy but it was not slop. I used AI to research, edit and review.

Which means every post is a fight. The model wants to smooth out the edges, fix the imperfections and make it perfectly boring. Yes, Claude, I do want to say weirdo and not unconventional. Trust me, dude, it’s better.