Is AI Democratising Articulation?
From Flashy Profiles to Thought Amplifiers – Is AI Democratising Articulation?
LinkedIn looks noticeably sharper these days. Scroll at breakfast and you’ll swim through studio‑lit profile shots, headline hooks that land, and mini‑essays that read like they were plucked from a trade journal. Spoiler: they weren’t.
Generative‑AI copy helpers—ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini et al.—have become the silent ghostwriters of professional networking. They turn half‑formed ideas into publication‑ready prose in the time it takes for Outlook to sync. For the first time, insightful but tongue‑tied thinkers can keep pace with the board‑room raconteur. That’s the upside.
1. The New Eloquence Layer
Before large‑language models, winning workplace debates meant thinking and speaking coherently in the same breath. Miss the moment and your idea died on the meeting‑room carpet. AI now wedges a buffer between cognition and communication—drafts appear, tone is tuned, clarity emerges. The result is a more level playing field for minds whose value never sat neatly inside a sound‑bite.
2. Spot the Em‑Dash Tells - 😉
Of course, the bots left a breadcrumb trail. For most of 2024 and better part of 2025 thus far, LinkedIn was awash with audacious em‑dashes—those long horizontal breaks that give text a TED‑talk cadence. 👀 You didn’t need to be a seasoned writer to spot them as the tell‑tale sign of ChatGPT copy‑and‑paste.
Ironically, authors who’d been using em‑dashes pre‑bot watched their signature flourish become a red flag for AI impersonation. Some dropped the dash in protest; others doubled‑down to reclaim it. The saga was so loud that OpenAI quietly tweaked ChatGPT’s style guide in May 2025—dialling back the dash frequency to blend into human norms.
If you suddenly see more semicolons, now you know why. And if you’re now quietly judging whether this piece is secretly ghost‑typed by ChatGPT—count the dashes and place your bets. 😉
3. Grammarly v2 — Normalising Digital Co‑Authors
Using AI to polish prose isn’t cheating—it’s the next logical upgrade to spell‑check and grammar tools we’ve leaned on for decades.
- Remember when Word started underlining misspellings in red? No one called it intellectual fraud; spell‑check was a headline feature.
- Grammarly raised the bar by flagging tone and clarity. Generative‑AI assistants simply extend that trajectory—suggesting rewrites, adjusting cadence, and condensing waffle at silicon speed.
- Mocking someone for using ChatGPT to sharpen phrasing is like teasing a colleague for pressing F7 in Word.
The stigma will fade as fast as auto‑correct became table‑stakes. The differentiator will be how you wield the tool, not whether you use it.
4. Raised Floor, Wider Spread
Yes, the average post reads better; but the variance has exploded. We still wade through hollow “10× your pipeline” threads—only now they’re grammatically flawless. That makes authenticity signals more valuable than ever: specific anecdotes, transparent citations, distinctive voice. They’re the new trust marks.
5. Guardrails for a Post‑Prompt World
- Use AI as draft, not dictator. Let the bot lay scaffolding; you pour the concrete.
- Add personal fingerprints—an anecdote, a local stat, a self‑deprecating aside.
- Perform a “dash check.” If every other sentence contains one, tone it down before you post.
- Own your missteps in comments. Authenticity beats algorithmic sheen.
Bottom line
AI hasn’t handed eloquence to everyone on a silver platter; it’s handed out power tools. Those who wield them with intent—tempering polish with personality—will cut through the feed. The rest risk sounding like the same well‑formatted echo.
Thanks for sticking around—this dash‑fest was a micro social experiment to see who taps out when the em‑dashes start flying (not that I’d ever know…)
