What changes when AI reads you first
The article discusses the limitations of AI writing advice that suggests telling AI to mimic one's voice. It highlights an experiment comparing AI-generated text with and without a voice profile, demonstrating significant differences in writing style. The author concludes that a voice profile informs the AI not just about vocabulary but about structural elements of writing.
- ▪AI writing advice often suggests telling models to mimic personal voice, which can be ineffective if the model has never read the individual.
- ▪An experiment showed that AI-generated text varies significantly when using a voice profile compared to when it does not.
- ▪A voice profile provides the AI with structural patterns of writing, influencing how it generates text.
2 outlets in our directory ran this story, first to last over 3 hours. All of the coverage we found sits in one bucket: centre. That one-sidedness is itself worth noticing.
Hacker News (Newest) files mainly under programming. We currently carry 5,306 of its stories.
Story provenance
Source · retrieval · rights · ranking — open for full record
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Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | Hacker News (Newest) |
| Canonical URL | https://onomeokajevo.substack.com/p/stop-telling-ai-to-sound-like-you |
| Publication time | Tue, 19 May 2026 09:31:04 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-05-19T09:34:57.479Z |
| Last seen | 2026-05-19T09:34:57.479Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | 7rLsmFlDhZQx · 2 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
Stop telling AI to "sound like you"It's the most common ai writing advice. Said to a model that has never read you, it means nothing.Onome OkajevoMay 19, 2026ShareMost AI writing advice starts off simply wrong:The above said to an AI that has never read you, that is usually slop.Thanks for reading! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.SubscribeYou 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.Here is the interesting question: what changes when the model already knows how you write before it generates a single word?The experimentI ran an experiment using the same brief and the same LLM model.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Hacker News (Newest).
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