I can't tell if you wrote that, and it's starting to bother me.

Some people are not going to like what I’m about to write, but hell, I’m going to write it anyway. AI is ruining social media.

I’m an Instagram girly. It’s the app I use the most, with the occasional TikTok hole when I need to swipe my life away or work out WHY MY TODDLER SUDDENLY HATES EVERYTHING I MAKE. And lately my Insta and LinkedIn feeds have become AI captions on top of AI content, with people filming face-to-camera videos, eyes flicking just past the lens to wherever the script is sitting, voices in a tone they’ve never used in real life. It’s making it genuinely hard to connect with any of it.

Now before this turns into the kind of article that would be quietly hypocritical, let me say it, I use AI. I’ve used it to write things, sharpen things, take an idea I’d otherwise take ten thousand words to articulate because I am, by nature, a yapper, and turn it into something a normal person would actually finish reading. It’s helped me tremendously. But what I keep noticing about my own process is that whenever I use it, I end up rewriting most of what comes back anyway. By the time I’m done I’m basically just using it as a very expensive sparring partner, which is fine, but I think it’s worth being honest that there’s a difference between using something to help you say what you mean vs. quietly letting it speak for you while you’re not paying attention.

And quite frankly, I hate that AI has ruined the em dash for me. That little guy was my go-to for articulating a point or opinion (or just plain sass), and I now strip it out of everything I write in case someone assumes I’m sponsored by ChatGPT.

What I see happening on a much bigger scale is that everyone has suddenly become an expert on everything, and all of it sounds the same. The same competent, stop/start, matter-of-fact voice, with the actual person underneath gone a bit quiet. The slightly weird turn of phrase, the opinion that isn’t tidy, the joke that only works if you know them, all being gently filed off in the editing. And I don’t think we’re better for it. We connect with people because of the slightly wrong way they say things, the tone you’d recognise from across a room, or the thing only they would have noticed. When that gets smoothed away there’s still plenty of content, sure, but content has never been the same thing as the person, and an industry that runs entirely on relationships is going to feel that gap before most others do.

I’m not anti-AI. I’m just sitting with the question of where the line is, somewhere between using a tool to help you find the words and letting it decide what you think, and I suspect most of us are quietly drifting across it without ever having noticed we did. Which I think means I’ve officially hit the Trough of Disillusionment when it comes to social media. The hype was great. I tried AI-written content and captions.

The bit I keep coming back to is that the work of figuring out what you actually want to say IS the work. The tools can help with the words, but they can’t do the thinking for you. And through all of this, the upside has actually been that it’s helped me find MY voice. I’d been quietly playing small, keeping myself in a box, not being my completely authentic self online, and that’s a pretty cool thing to land on by accident.

So if you’ve been quietly editing your real voice out of your content because the Claude/Chatgpt/etc version felt safer, I’d very gently suggest you stop. The thing that makes you worth reading is the bit that doesn’t sound like everyone else. Please do not let it get smoothed away. Some of us are out here squinting at our inboxes trying to find a real person, and we’d quite like to find you.

On a lighter note, this one was written the long way, on my couch, propped up with cold & flu medication, and far too many Buttermenthols.

First published by Alana on LinkedIn in June 2026, republished here with her permission.