What are the long-term consequences of AI? They say: “If you meet the Buddha by the road, kill him.”
It simply means that if you worship any fixed idea outside your immediate experience, it is an illusion — destroy it. Don’t worship the map; walk the path. If something or someone hinders your “direct seeing,” let it go.
In an article I found on LinkedIn titled “Every Company Now Sounds Like ChatGPT— and That’s the Biggest Brand Opportunity in a Decade,” the author says that an analysis of 73 corporate documents has revealed the consistent use of the same syntactic constructions across multiple brands. Brands begin to sound the same:
Language models are trained to produce the statistical average of everything ever written, so when enough companies route their communications through them, every company starts sounding like the average of every other company.
Ahrefs analyzed 900,000 new web pages and found 74% contained AI-generated content. As more and more brands use ChatGPT, more and more brands begin sounding like ChatGPT.
The author concludes: “Today, sounding different becomes the rarest competitive advantage a company can have. The company with real personality, earned conviction, and concrete specificity stands out like a bonfire in a field of flashlights.”
AI makes you sound like AI — and makes you lose your voice. When we allow AI to speak for us, we become mute. When we meet a new person, we instinctively look for something unique about them. We call a person interesting only if they have a voice — not when they sound like everyone else.
Having a voice means to see and describe things in a way no one else does. I don’t want my friends to sound the same today as they did yesterday. If they are alive, they must have new experiences today worth sharing. And when they do, it makes me come alive too.
When we meet someone who sounds average, we quickly forget what they say. Yet we know — almost instinctively — that there are no average people. If someone sounds average, it simply means they have lost their voice: for some reason, they don’t speak from their own experience.
Unlike AI, we have direct experience. We are not merely a database of theoretical knowledge. We have cooked an omelet a thousand times — and we know how to make it, not as information, but as an embodied practice. And we can speak of it in our own voice.
The world desperately lacks voices because we keep delegating our voice to the Buddha by the road. If something doesn’t allow you to speak from your own heart, life, and experience — kill it. The world doesn’t need the average — only the real.
The real will be remembered. Real people are remembered, real names and brands are remembered. They can’t help being remembered — because they call. Interestingly, the word voice is related to the Latin vocare, “to call.”
To have a voice means to call. If I encounter something or someone and nothing calls to me, I will quickly forget it. We are living in a unique time — people are beginning to sense that being fully human pays, while being less than human doesn’t.
If I want to have a voice — to call, to awaken — I must speak from my direct experience. Without reference to any Buddha on the road.
“Memory favors the company that said something pointed… something that made them think ‘these people actually know what they’re talking about.’ Corporate America is converging on a single voice. The brands that opt out will own the next decade.” — Quote from the above-mentioned article on LinkedIn.
