Posts That Do Not Sound Generated

Why people can tell

Customers now spot generated text in about a second, and spotting it costs you more trust than a plain, clumsy post ever would.

The tells are consistent:

• Nothing specific. Claims that could belong to any business in your trade.
• Everything in threes. Three adjectives, three benefits, three-part sentences, over and over.
• Vocabulary nobody uses out loud: elevate, seamless, curated, passionate about.
• The hedge. "Many customers find that..."
• A closing question nobody asked. "What's your favourite way to start the morning?"

Here is the thing worth understanding: none of that is a style problem. It is what text looks like when it contains no information. The model wrote around a hole, because you gave it a topic instead of a fact.

Bring raw material, not a topic

"Write a post about our bakery" produces a hole. This does not:

This morning: started 4:40. Flour delivery was two hours late
so we ran the sourdough behind everything. 22 loaves out at
8:15 instead of 7. Sold out by 10:40 anyway. Regular customer
Antoni waited 40 minutes and took two.

Turn this into a 60-word Instagram caption. Plain, first
person, no hashtags, no closing question. Keep the times.

Same model, same account, completely different post — because the second one contains things only you could know.

The practical habit: talk into your phone for ninety seconds at the end of the day about what actually happened. Feed that in. Your job is the material; the model's job is compression and format.

Teach it your voice with examples

Adjectives do not transfer voice. Examples do.

Paste five things you wrote yourself — captions, emails, a WhatsApp broadcast — and say: match this. It will pick up your sentence length, whether you use contractions, that you always lead with the price, that you never use a question mark. None of which you could have described.

Then edit, every time, with three cuts:

1. 1Delete the last line. It is almost always a rhetorical question or a tidy summary.
2. 2Remove one adjective per sentence.
3. 3Put back the odd detail it smoothed away. The 40-minute wait. The name Antoni. That detail is the post.

Cheap to post is not a reason to post

AI makes daily posting easy, which is a trap. Posting daily with nothing to say trains your audience to scroll past you. Weekly with something real beats daily with filler, and always did.

The cost of AI marketing is usually not money. It is paid in attention, and you cannot get it back.

The line you do not cross

You do not need to label a caption you wrote with help. Writing tools are writing tools.

You do need to never fabricate:

• No invented customer reviews or testimonials. In most countries this is straightforwardly illegal advertising, and the fines are not small.
• No AI-generated photo of a product you do not sell, or a shop interior that does not exist.
• No fake before-and-after. In regulated trades — clinics, cosmetics, weight loss — this is the fastest route to a complaint that sticks.
• No AI face presented as a real member of staff or a real customer.

Major platforms increasingly require synthetic media to be labelled, and the EU AI Act adds transparency duties for AI-generated content as it phases in. But the practical reason is simpler. Every one of these is discoverable, and being caught faking a review is a story that outlives the business.

The honest summary

AI is good at the second draft of marketing and bad at the first. It cannot notice that the light was good this morning, that a customer said something funny, or that the new supplier is better. Those are the posts that work, and they still start with you paying attention.