#12. You need a spellchecker. Not ChatGPT
The dangers of letting AI write your posts for you, no matter what the growth gurus say
ℹ️ This article was inspired by a recurring discussion with Ife Kuku Thomas, who had eventually suggested to summarise my thoughts into a structured article for future references
Every quick change in society creates a possibility for some piece of common knowledge to become obsolete. The reason is very simple – it takes time to build the common knowledge or a best practice. If something in the world is changing faster than that, then not enough time has passed for the new best practice to form.
The rapid growth of AI tools is exactly that kind of change. Some best practices from a year ago that made sense, today have become simply good, or even bad practices. In particular it is true for content writing, especially on LinkedIn.
In this article I want to talk about two things:
why writing with ChatGPT was a ✅ good practice 1-2 years ago;
why writing with ChatGPT is a ❌ bad practice today (in 2026).
The purpose of writing
People post on LinkedIn for many reasons, but ultimately the goal is roughly the same – get your name in the people’s minds so that they notice you, resonate with you, remember you and hopefully engage with you. So at the very least you must leave a positive impression, signaling your level of professionalism along with the actual message you’re spreading.
No matter what the message is, there are hundreds of different ways to formulate it, and every detail of how you do it will determine how the message is perceived by the readers. Will they think you’re fun or boring, knowledgable or ignorant, professional or amateur, authentic or fake. So ideally you should know what kind of audience you’re trying to reach and how you want to be perceived by them.
In a hypothetic scenario of being fired because of AI, you could write a post like this:
The AI craziness has got me too now 😭
After busting my ass at this company for 30 years, I got fired! 💔
And you know why?! Because the new owner, whom I treated to sweets every time he visited his dad’s office as a kid, now thinks that some faceless machine can do my job better and cheaper than me! After all this time, I was nothing more to them than a line in the spreadsheet 🤬If you know someone who still cares about people and needs an experienced typography designer, please, drop me a line! 🙏🏼
Or you could write a post like this:
Probably everyone knows at least one person who was affected by the layoffs in the last 2 years due to the rapid growth of AI adoption. The disruption that AI tools brought to the software-development market was now inevitably coming to the design industry. The release of Claude Design was a clear signal of that.
Yesterday, as a result of the workforce optimisation, our design department has been restructured and my role has been terminated.
The change has come. It’s now time to adapt.
Yet my passion for typography has not changed, and I’ll keep doing it for as long as I can. Reach out if you want a quality design made by a human.
The two versions have different vibes and each of them would have an audience that would resonate with it. But the two audiences probably wouldn’t overlap much, which is why it’s good to consciously decide who are you talking to and how you want to present yourself.
The levels of mastery
There are several levels of mastery that you can have in your writing, which reflect the language level at which you operate. In the English language the hierarchy is the following: letters → words → sentences → stories.
So when someone reads your post, they will subconsciously judge about your professionalism based on how well each level is executed:
words need correct spelling;
(one wrong letter might be corrected automatically by a native speaker from your field, but create a struggle for a foreigner without the vocabulary intuition; yet it will be noticed by everyone);sentences need correct grammar
(punctuation signs specify the pauses and relation between parts of the sentence, making the text easier to read and digest);stories need good structure, flow and vocabulary
(well-structured story is easy to follow and understand, keeps the reader engaged and ultimately determines whether they would read from you again).
What is important, is that spelling and grammar are practically carved in stone. They are very specific rules that you either follow or break. If a reader doesn’t know those rules, they wouldn’t care. But the readers who do know the rules, will immediately notice any spelling and grammar mistakes or repeating words due to poor vocabulary. And to those readers, from the first glance, you will not look professional, no matter how good you are at the actual thing you’re writing about.
Especially grammar gets neglected quite often, with no commas, no question marks, no colons, no quotation marks. All these punctuation signs have a purpose, and they make life easier for the people who can read them. So please, don’t skip punctuation!
Writing style
The last level of building sentences into a story is completely different from the first two. There is no set of rules carved in stone. There are different schools of thought, different styles that work best in different settings. Finally, there are personal styles that come from your social, cultural and professional background, or even from specialised training and intentional choice.
And that’s where you have the most freedom to actually stand out with your own style that reflects the way you talk. For example, I have an academic background, so it’s more natural for me to write long sentences and structured paragraphs with item lists, back-references and footnotes. But when I write posts for general public, I make sentences shorter and use fewer specialised terms to not come across as boring or over-complicated.
Your writing style can change from one situation to another, to serve your purpose or to reflect your character; and that’s what makes it an important component of your personal brand. It’s different from the vast majority of people, so it becomes recognisable.
When ChatGPT was good
For a short time since its release, ChatGPT was giving people an advantage of writing texts that look professional. It didn’t make any spelling or grammar mistakes, because those are well-defined rules that are easy to follow. And it could build sentences into clear structures, following one of the few industry-standard writing styles that professional writers would use.
To a person who never did any specialised training, that was a tremendous level-up, because suddenly they could turn an unstructured train of thoughts into a structured text that sounded like an established thought leader on a TEDx stage. That is cheating of course, but at least it made you stand out, because there were very few established thought leaders, and tons of people who simply write like they speak – just casual.
So if you consistently used ChatGPT to do your writing, it would effectively become your style, at least online. It served the purpose enough to justify its use.
Now ChatGPT is distasteful
The situation has changed dramatically as soon as ChatGPT became so popular that everyone started writing like an established thought leader. Even people who couldn’t write “Mary had a little lamb“ without a spelling mistake could now post perfectly-written long analytical texts, sounding like an expert with 30 years of personal experience in the industry.
That is still cheating, like it was before, but it has lost the advantage of standing out from the crowd. Now everyone has this tool and almost everyone uses it. So now by writing with ChatGPT you still may level-up the objective quality of your writing, but you make it completely indistinguishable from everyone else. And that essentially kills the recognition of your personal brand.
Here are a few examples of typical word structures that ChatGPT uses way too much in its writing, which more and more people start to recognise:
“It’s not X, it’s Y“, “It isn’t just about X. It’s about Y.“
“But here’s the truth“, “But here’s what nobody’s saying“, “Then I realized:“
“something shifted quietly“, “something broke. Not loudly, but quietly.“
These structures alone are not necessarily bad; they have their place when the context is appropriate. Some of these elements are used legitimately by trained speakers to create emotions in the live audience of thousands of people actively listening to every single word, especially in combination with the tone of voice, gestures and dramatic pauses. But that kind of delivery feels completely out of place, if not comical, in a LinkedIn post seen by 100 people.
Honestly, whenever I see that typical epic-stage-speaker style in a LinkedIn post, I imagine a person sitting on a toilet, in front of a microphone on stage. It’s ridiculous.
On top of that AI can also generate nonsensical phrases that even an established thought leader would never say, like in these examples:
The real difference isn’t between good and bad design.
But its between
forgettable vs effective.
or
It does not rely on intention.
It relies on repetition.
There are many more example of course. If you’re interested, have a look at the article “The Field Guide to AI Slop“ by Charlie Guo, who goes into more details on this topic.
And the last danger of AI writing is that it’s too easy to inflate your original concise message into 2x or 10x bigger post for no reason. Here is how ChatGPT rewrote that hypothetical layoff post for LinkedIn:
Well… the AI wave finally hit me too.
After 30 years at the same company, I was laid off.
What hurts most is not just losing the job — it’s realizing how quickly decades of loyalty, experience, and dedication can be reduced to a cost-saving decision. The new owner is someone I remember as a child visiting his father’s office. Back then, I’d greet him with sweets and a smile. Today, he believes AI can replace my work faster and cheaper.
Maybe technology changes. Maybe business changes. But people still matter.
Typography design has been my craft for three decades, and I’m not done yet. Experience, attention to detail, and human judgment still have value — at least I hope they do.
So here I am, starting over.
If you know someone looking for an experienced typography designer, I’d truly appreciate a connection, recommendation, or message.
And to everyone navigating similar challenges right now: you’re not alone.
Do you spot anything familiar? This is how every other post on LinkedIn sounds like nowadays, and there is no value in being like everybody else. And most importantly, while it’s factually the same message, it has lost all of my personal style of expression, because that’s not how I talk.
So remember, when it comes to the writing style, no rules are carved in stone. There are some general guidelines, but in the details it’s really a matter of how you actually speak and express yourself. And that should be uniquely yours.
Epilogue
So to summarise, when you delegate your writing to AI, you create a disconnect between yourself and your brand. That disconnect is not authentic and that is never a good thing. In the long run, even if your brand does become successful, you risk turning into a hostage of your own fake avatar, unless you learn to talk like an LLM yourself.
Regardless of that, it will be harder to distinguish you from the millions of other people who have the same avatar in their pocket. And if that doesn’t bother you, then you should ask yourself why are you posting anything in the first place.
Finally, today it is easier than ever to write without mistakes. Spellcheckers are built-in almost everywhere. Grammar checkers are becoming widespread too. For example, it’s part of Apple Intelligence in the latest macOS versions, or available in standalone apps, like Grammarly or Harper. But obviously, if you can learn it for yourself – even better. So you have no excuse to let AI decide for you what words to put in which order to say the thing that you already know.
In this context I want to end with the quote from a LinkedIn post by Carlo Martinucci that I came across while writing this article, which happens to fit the occasion:
I'd rather read something started by a human and finished by an AI, than something started by an AI and finished by a human