Brand Voice in the Age of AI: How to Sound Human, Still

Safal Ahmed
Aug 21
3 min read

Updated: Aug 22

Don’t you think AI has rewritten the way brands communicate? What began as cautious trials with “drafting assistants” has become standard practice across industries. From product descriptions to email subject lines to LinkedIn posts (don’t even get us started!) machine-generated text is everywhere.

Our point being, everything is starting to sound…the same.

The rhythm of the sentences. The sickly sweet corporate warmth. The slightly-too-balanced phrasing.

This is the paradox: the more we rely on AI to speak, the more our voices risk turning into a single, uniform hum.

Voice Is Not Decoration

People have long misunderstood brand voice. Too often, it gets reduced to a slide in the brand guideline deck: a few adjectives like “approachable,” “friendly,” “professional.” Nice, but not very useful, is it?

Real voice is an operating system.

Mailchimp understood this years ago. Their brand voice wasn’t “quirky” because the guidelines said so. It was built into every email subject line, error message, and illustration. They sounded playful, but never careless. That voice was part of its positioning and very much intentional.

AI, by default, fails to create that kind of depth. It creates competent, neutral output.

Which brings me to…

The Middle of the Road Problem

AI is extraordinarily good at being average. It pulls from millions and millions of examples and produces the most statistically likely next word.

But marketing isn’t about averages. It’s about edges.

Even if you aren’t a yoga-loving, matcha-crazy, acai-bowl-eating person out there, you might have seen a pack of Oatly around, physically or digitally. Their copy is long, rambling, self-aware, even awkward. It definitely doesn’t read like it was designed to “convert” in a neat A/B test. On the other hand, it reads like someone’s inner monologue printed on the side of a carton. In a sea of generic “healthy lifestyle” messaging, that oddity was the point.

Or let’s take a look at Patagonia. A voice that carries conviction, sometimes blunt to the point of discomfort. Their now-famous “Don’t Buy This Jacket” campaign worked precisely because, well, absolutely no one else in the category sounded like that.

Neither of these voices would survive untouched in an AI draft. The software would iron out the quirks, sand down the edges, remove the friction. And in doing so, it would remove the distinction.

What Humans Still Do Better

Machines can scale words. At the speed of light, figuratively. But, humans give them weight.

Only humans understand that sometimes the most powerful sentence is just three words. Or that breaking grammar rules can be an act of rebellion, not error. Or that silence, a pause in a video, a line left unsaid, can say more than paragraphs of explanation.

AI can mimic patterns, but not principles. It doesn’t know why Patagonia’s copy works, or why a Mailchimp error message makes you smirk instead of sigh.

Guarding Your Voice in the AI Era

So, what should we all do? Not retreat from AI, but treat it as scaffolding. Build around it, take support from it, but don’t let it be the final structure. The final voice must remain human.

Some things to keep in mind:

Make voice strategic. If it doesn’t connect to positioning, it will drift into genericness.
Audit constantly. Put your writing next to three competitors. If it feels interchangeable, it’s not working.
Keep the edges. Resist the urge to over-polish. The imperfect line, the unexpected rhythm, the too-honest phrase? Preserve it with every fibre of your being.