The Algorithm Ate My Personality
When everyone sounds “authentic,” no one does.
In the early days of "brand voice," there was promise. Voice was a differentiator. A signal of personality, taste, and cultural context. It meant something to sound different.
Now, I fear everyone is starting to sound like everyone else. Worse, they all sound like LinkedIn.
The brands we encounter daily, from startups to legacy players, have begun speaking in a shared, sanitized dialect: lowercase, introspective, "relatable." Copy has become content. Content has become performance. And performance has become optimized.
The irony is that, in trying to sound like humans, brands have never sounded more mechanical.
The Optimization Trap
We didn't get here accidentally. We built the system that flattened us.
As marketing teams became increasingly data-driven, personality was the first thing on the chopping block. A/B testing rewards "safe" language. Algorithms prioritize engagement over originality. And AI (trained on the internet's most middling output) offers a shortcut to sounding technically correct but emotionally hollow.
Voice, once a creative asset, became a calculated output: a slider between "quirky but professional" and "thoughtful but accessible."
The consequences show up in the content. Everyone's "feminist but chill," "smart but not snobby," "inclusive but algorithmically inoffensive." Brand personality has become a formula: optimized for engagement, scrubbed of friction.
The Rise of Content That Performs, Not Connects
Nowhere is this more visible than in the modern insight carousel—the favored content format of thought leaders and startups alike.
Slide 1: "Here's what no one tells you about branding." Slide 2: "Clarity is a luxury." Slide 3: Beige background. Helvetica text. Emotional absence. Slide 4: "Resonate. Don't just sell."
It looks smart. It gets saved. But does anyone feel anything? Probably not.
What these carousels reveal is a deeper issue: marketing that performs intimacy without ever getting close. Brands are signaling connection, but not building it. And audiences, increasingly savvy to the mechanics, are disengaging.
The AI Content Crisis of 2024
The algorithmic flattening of brand voice heightened in 2024, which marks the tipping point at which AI-generated content stopped being a novelty and became a crutch. The year delivered several moments that captured the way technology can amplify mediocrity.
Google's Gemini Olympics ad sparked industry-wide controversy when critics accused it of "undermining genuine human creativity and over-glorifying AI." The ad showed a father using AI to help his daughter write a fan letter to Olympic hurdler Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone—a premise that felt less like empowerment and more like outsourcing emotion itself.
Coca-Cola's AI-generated Christmas campaign proved equally divisive, replacing the warmth of their iconic holiday storytelling with computer-generated imagery that felt hollow and artificial. What was once a moment of genuine seasonal magic became a technical demonstration masquerading as emotion.
The pattern was clear: brands were choosing efficiency over authenticity, speed over soul. The result wasn't just bad creative,nbut a signal that brands no longer trusted themselves to have something interesting to say. They'd rather let the machine speak for them, even if the machine had nothing meaningful to contribute.
But perhaps most telling was the industry's response. Marketing forecasts suggest that "51.9% of marketers are very likely to incorporate AI-generated avatars" in 2025, doubling down on artificial personality rather than developing real ones. The lesson of 2024, that audiences crave authenticity, is being ignored in favor of scalable content production.
When Authenticity Becomes Performance
The cruel irony of our current moment is that "authenticity" itself has become a performance. Brands don't just sound the same; they sound the same while claiming to be different.
This vulnerability industrial complex has spawned countless LinkedIn posts about "being real," "showing up imperfectly," and "the messy middle." But this performed authenticity is more alienating than traditional corporate speak because it masquerades as genuine while remaining fundamentally calculated.
Consider the rise of "founder vulnerability" content: carefully crafted posts about entrepreneurial struggles, complete with soft lighting and strategic emotional beats. These might once have been authentic moments shared, but now they're authentic moments performed for algorithmic amplification. The medium has become the message, and the message is hollow.
The same pattern shows up in brand storytelling. Companies now lead with their "why," share their "journey," and invite audiences to "be part of something bigger." But when everyone's journey follows the same narrative arc, when every why sounds interchangeable, the performance of authenticity becomes just as jarring than straightforward corporate messaging ever was.
This performative authenticity creates a new kind of distance between brands and audiences. It's the uncanny valley of marketing: close enough to real emotion to feel familiar, but artificial enough to trigger suspicion. Audiences are both disengaging and actively recoiling from brands that feel like they're trying too hard to be human.
From Voice to Vacuum: The Lonely Brand
The result of this content machine is isolation. Brands post more than ever, but feel increasingly distant. They say everything "right," yet nothing that lingers.
It's the loneliness of a brand that's everywhere, but no one wants to talk to. A perfectly curated Instagram grid with no comments. A Slack community that died two months after launch. A "thoughtful" newsletter that never sparks a reply.
Coca-Cola's 2024 AI-generated holiday ad (once a moment of real emotional resonance) was rebooted into a soulless CGI sequence that critics called "disturbing" and "emotionally vacant." Spotify Wrapped 2024, with its AI-generated genre names, felt like it had lost the core magic of the experience: specificity, surprise, and a little bit of human awkwardness. Even the UK Labour Party's TikTok experiment with AI animals landed as noise—more gimmick than gesture.
All of these efforts failed for the same reason: they were optimized for output, not emotion. And audiences noticed.
The Brands That Remembered How to Feel
Thankfully, not all brands have surrendered to the algorithm.
Pine Sol still baffles and delights its users with chaotic memes. Liquid Death continues to sell canned water like it's a death metal album, with their 2024 campaigns pushing even further into absurdist territory. Foxtrot (pre-implosion) published billboard copy that read like stray group texts from a brand with opinions and a pulse.
But 2024 also revealed new champions of authentic voice. Charli XCX's "Brat" album didn't just dominate music—it redefined aesthetic culture, making "Brat green" the color of summer 2024 and inspiring countless brands to adopt its raw, unpolished energy. The campaign worked because it felt genuinely rebellious, not performatively so.
Gap's music partnerships with Tyla and Troye Sivan earned recognition as "the most savvy use of music in marketing this year" not because they were perfectly optimized, but because they felt like genuine cultural collaborations rather than branded content disguised as artistry.
Meanwhile, smaller brands like Glossier continued to speak like they were texting a friend, even when their unicorn-moment felt over. Patagonia maintained their activist voice even when it wasn't algorithmically optimal. These brands understood something their algorithmic competitors missed: voice isn't about saying the right thing. It's about having a point of view interesting enough to listen to.
What united these successful brands was their willingness to risk being disliked by some people in order to be genuinely loved by others. They hadn't abandoned strategy, but they'd refused to flatten themselves into a content template.
What We Lose When We Play It Safe
Brand voice is not a garnish. It's not the "fun part" you get to plug in after the real work is done. It is the work. Because voice is the signal that tells people who you are—and more importantly, whether you're worth listening to.
When we replace voice with algorithmic patterns, we lose:
Emotional clarity
Cultural specificity
Actual connection
And as AI-generated content floods the feed, voice will be one of the few assets left that can't be faked.
The Way Forward: Choosing Signal Over Noise
As we move into the second half 2025 (What? Already??), the choice facing brands isn't between human and artificial, but between meaningful and meaningless. The brands that thrive won't be the ones that sound most like everyone else, or even the ones that sound most "authentic." They'll be the ones that sound most like themselves.
This means accepting that good voice work is inherently risky. It means writing for humans, not algorithms. It means being willing to alienate people who weren't going to become customers anyway.
The algorithm might eat personality, but it can't digest genuine conviction. And that's where the opportunity lies.
Reclaiming the Right to Be Interesting
If there's a call here, it's not to reject strategy. It's to make space for humanity within it on the ground level.
Let your brand be idiosyncratic. Let it say the wrong thing sometimes. Let it speak in paragraphs, not bullet points. Be more specific. Be less sure. And above all: stop writing for the algorithm and start writing for someone.
Because the algorithm might drive distribution, but voice drives loyalty.
And the brands people love (truly, irrationally love) are not the most optimized, but the most alive.