How to Write LinkedIn Posts That Don't Sound Like AI

Most people can spot an untouched AI post in a few seconds.

Soft opener. Soft take. Soft ending that asks for your thoughts without earning them.

Using AI is fine. Publishing the first draft unchanged is the problem.

"Leadership is hard" gets ignored. "I waited three weeks to fire a vendor and it cost us the April launch" gets read. Same topic. Different level of trust.

The feed is full of posts that sound like they were written for everyone and no one. Your job is not to win a writing contest. It is to sound like a person who was actually in the room when something happened.

Readers forgive imperfect grammar. They don't forgive posts that feel copied from a template everyone else is also using.

Start with 3-5 posts you've already published. Not only your best ones. Your normal ones.

Notice the pattern: short lines or longer ones? Questions or straight statements? Words you never use?

Put that into a profile: your role, who you talk to, topics you return to, phrases to avoid.

"Sound like a thought leader" doesn't help. Clear constraints do: short sentences, no jargon list, tone closer to how you'd explain it to a peer over coffee.

If you only feed the model your polished keynote posts, it will imitate the version of you that shows up on stage, not the version that writes on Tuesday morning. Include the messy middle.

Save two posts you dislike too. "Don't write like this" is as useful as "do write like this" when you're training yourself or a tool.

Make a note of phrases you won't publish:

delve · landscape · game-changer · "it's not X, it's Y" · "in today's fast-paced world" · "would love your thoughts"

Then replace vague claims with specifics.

Instead of "we improved retention," write "churn went from about 8% to 4% in Q1 after we rewrote onboarding."

Instead of "building in public changed everything," write "I posted our failed pricing test and three founders DM'd me the same week with better numbers to try."

If a paragraph could sit under a competitor's name and still work, rewrite it until it can't. That test catches more AI smell than any detector.

Keep the list visible while you edit. You'll start catching the phrases before you publish, which is the whole point.

AI is good at structure and okay at general advice. It is weak on the small things that prove you were there.

A date that wasn't round. A name you can omit but a role you can't. The moment you realized the spreadsheet was wrong.

You don't need to overshare. One concrete detail per post is often enough to shift the tone from template to human.

Founders sometimes worry this makes them look unpolished. In practice, the opposite happens. Specificity reads as confidence. Generic wisdom reads as outsourced.

Try this before you publish: highlight every sentence that could apply to any company in your category. Rewrite at least one of them with something from your last two weeks at work.

Read the draft out loud once. You'll catch the warm-up sentence you don't need.

Cut the opener if it's only clearing your throat. Add one line you'd say to a colleague: a doubt, a tradeoff, a take your marketing site wouldn't use.

Swap any sentence that sounds like it belongs in a press release. Shorten lines that run longer than you'd speak them.

Skip this when you're rushing and you usually get polite likes with little conversation. Do it and the draft gets shorter and clearer. That's usually the version worth posting.

Give yourself ten minutes between the AI draft and the final read. Fresh eyes catch "Furthermore" and "Additionally" faster than tired ones.

AI is useful for getting unstuck: turning a bullet list into a draft, trying three angles on the same story, cleaning up grammar when you're tired.

It gets in the way when you ask it to invent your opinions. If you don't have a take yet, no tool will give you one that sounds like yours.

A simple workflow: write the core idea in one paragraph yourself, let AI expand or restructure, then rewrite the top third and the last line by hand. Those are the parts people remember.

The goal is not to hide that you used help. The goal is to publish something you'd stand behind if someone quoted it back to you in a meeting.

When a draft feels 80% right, the last 20% is almost always manual: your examples, your hedges, your punchline.

Create a five-point checklist you run on every post: Does the hook match the body? Is there one specific detail? Did you cut one sentence that's only throat-clearing? Would you send this to a peer without cringing? Does it sound like you on a normal day, not you on a conference panel?

That checklist takes two minutes once you're used to it. It saves you from the slow reputation damage of posting generic content for months.

Over time you'll internalize the checks and need the list less. Until then, keep it next to your draft doc. Habits beat inspiration when you're posting three times a week.