Sagivo's essay on AI-generated writing style goes viral
A startup founder critiques the homogenized, overly-polished tone now pervading internet content written with AI assistance.
What to know
- A startup founder's essay criticizing the distinctive, homogenized tone emerging in AI-assisted writing has gone viral, resonating with readers who recognize the pattern in tech, startup, and corporate communication.
- The critique identifies specific markers: excessive em dashes, corporate jargon, artificial sentence transitions, and overly polished prose that mirrors patterns in training data like LinkedIn posts rather than authentic human speech.
- The piece is gaining rapid traction on Hacker News and social networks, suggesting widespread audience fatigue with the recognizable formulaic style AI tools are producing across internet content.
Sagivo Startup founder, blogger
How it unfolded 2 developments, newest first · click a bar or a number to jump articlesposts
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Essay spreads across Mastodon social network
The essay began circulating on Mastodon with hashtag promotion (#AI, #Tone, #Communication, #Critique), extending its reach beyond Hacker News to federated social media audiences.
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1 outlet I'm Tired of the AI Tone
first by HN Frontpage, 6d ago
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I don't use LLMs a whole lot, mostly for research, but personally I'm more bothered by the prompting than by the responses. After years of randomly receiving (now less frequent) incorrect answers, I've gotten used to preempting obvious but wrong trains of thought: "I need X. It's not Y." When I forget to do this and the reply is incorrect…
2 more of the top 3 · 12 posts in this stretch
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I'm Tired of the AI Tone L: https:// sagivo.com/blog/im-tired-of-th e-ai-tone C: https:// news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4 9774665 posted on 2026.09.20 at 07:18:26 (c=0, p=3)
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One thing that works quite well for me for a couple of model generations now is to mention https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simplified_Technical_English, something along the lines of **Use controlled technical English.** Prefer an ASD-STE100 style: use short sentences, direct terms, active voice, and one idea per sentence; avoid slang, hype, vague…
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Essay gains traction on Hacker News
The article reached Hacker News frontpage status with growing engagement, accumulating 23 comments and a score of 23 within hours of publication, indicating significant reader resonance with the critique.
“I'm talking about the weird, increasingly recognizable way everything on the internet now sounds like it was written by the same extremely articulate 27-year-old who has never had a bad day.”
— Sagivo, Startup founder, blogger · source -
background
Sagivo publishes essay on homogenized AI writing tone — A startup founder and blogger published an essay titled "I'm Tired of the AI Tone" that critiques the increasingly recognizable stylistic patterns in internet content shaped by AI language models. The piece identifies specific markers: overuse of em dashes, corporate jargon like "land-and-expand wedge," artificially perfect sentence transitions, and an obsession with making every thought flow seamlessly—patterns Sagivo attributes to machines trained on masses of LinkedIn posts.
What people are saying 9 voices from 1 site · best of 12 · verbatim
- Sep 20
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I find using an AI for the first draft useful enough of a kick in the ass to actually get the thing written, which I've probably been procrastinating about for hours.I rewrite it from there, and it's completely different by the time I'm done because it's version is terrible enough that it annoys me into correcting it.
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I understand where you’re coming from but for me, LLMs were a godsend. It helps me every day to stop procrastinating and finally write tickets, specs, reports, “professional“ messages, documentation and a bunch of other stuff.I give it (low effort) bullet points, general direction, plain (and usually too honest/direct and sometimes even insulting)…
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My rule of thumb is: AI is for automating tasks, tedium and filtering firehoses, not thinking and communicating.Also, I've found it's best to never trust it's response to a "why" question (formatted this way because a lot of people will will ask AI to speak for them, so you can still get a"why" response without ever having personally prompted for…
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"AI writing has this strange obsession with making every sentence flow beautifully into the next one. Real people don't do that."If we care, we bloody try!
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> Have it rewrite your terrible first draft.> Have it fix your grammar.> Have it make your argument clearer.> Have it turn your 2,000-word ramble into something people can actually read.Please don't do this, and then try to "put some of yourself back into it".By all means, use AI to find bugs. But don't let it write a single word. Let it tell you…
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This actually makes me think about what kind of material these companies actually used to train the models. I remember watching a video from Andrej Karapathy and him telling that in OpenAI they used subject matter experts to refine the training material for earlier versions of ChatGPT.I wonder even if normal people don’t talk, write like that, the…
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That's what I like most about codex, it has the 'pragmatic' tone mode which basically makes it tone-less. If claude's tone was the only one available I would seriously consider not even using LLMs or switching to a career that didn't require it because I literally can't stand interacting with it's personality for many hours each day.
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If you’d have told me this breathless post. Talking about being tired about the AI tone.Punctuated like this.Was then AI tone…Then I’d have believed you.
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> Nobody talks like this in real life.Marketing folks talked like that, for almost my entire career (it was basically a meme), which wound up, as AI was coming into its own.