Stop telling AI to "sound like you" - Onome Okajevo
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Stop telling AI to "sound like you"<br>It's the most common ai writing advice. Said to a model that has never read you, it means nothing.
Onome Okajevo<br>May 19, 2026
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Most AI writing advice starts off simply wrong:
The above said to an AI that has never read you, that is usually slop.<br>Thanks for reading! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.
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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.<br>Here is the interesting question: what changes when the model already knows how you write before it generates a single word?<br>The experiment
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.”<br>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.<br>The no-profile version starts like a competent explainer:<br>▎ There is a temptation to describe modern AI as if it were mostly a new kind of text interface...<br>That is clear, maybe even useful. It is the default register of a good frontier model: define the topic, frame the issue, proceed carefully.<br>The profile-guided version starts differently:<br>▎ There is a framing of large language models that treats them as oracles...<br>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.<br>That is the part people miss when they talk about AI writing style.<br>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.<br>Conclusion
A prompt tells the model what to do, a profile tells it who is doing the writing.
Full comparison:<br>https://usenoren.ai/sample-voice-profile#generation<br>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.<br>Thanks for reading! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.
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