I’ve been thinking about the importance of tone of voice in our writing recently.
It was sparked by encountering increasing amounts of AI-generated content that sounds wildly over-enthusiastic and makes grandiose claims to something’s importance.
If you’ve ever wondered why AIs do this, a Wikipedia advice page explains it nicely:
“… LLMs are usually trained on data from the internet in which famous people are generally described with positive, important-sounding language. Consequently, the LLM tends to omit specific, unusual, nuanced facts (which are statistically rare) and replace them with more generic, positive descriptions (which are statistically common). Thus the highly specific “inventor of the first train-coupling device” might become “a revolutionary titan of industry”. It is like shouting louder and louder that a portrait shows a uniquely important person, while the portrait itself is fading from a sharp photograph into a blurry, generic sketch. The subject becomes simultaneously less specific and more exaggerated.”
Whether copy is AI-generated or not, there is, of course, a problem when we over-inflate something’s importance: credibility. It goes back to the old saying ‘if something sounds too good to be true, it probably is’. It’s a problem that’s explored in What tech brands get wrong when they try to act like Big Tech.
All this makes it more important than ever to have a tone of voice that reflects who you actually are. It will give you a guide for both human writers and AI writers to use – and a way to spot copy that ‘just doesn’t sound like us’.
If you’d like some guidance on finding and using your tone of voice, you might like these articles of mine: How do you find your tone of voice if you’re a B2B? and How do you help people to write in your company’s tone of voice?
