AI cannot write in my voice

I gave my agent years of my own writing. Nine years of journals, more than 150,000 words. Another 130,000 words of letters to pen pals. So one voice with hundreds of thousands of real written words. This should be the perfect case to copy how someone writes. But it still cannot draft a paragraph I would recognize as mine.

Like when a friend told me that a pun I made, teasing her about her nationality, was a line that sounds like me. At least AI cannot come close to that yet despite overwhelming context.

Maybe it has also read only what I put on the page, but not what I chose to leave off. The line I deleted for being too much. The point I left unsaid. A voice is as much what you cut as what you keep, and the cutting leaves no trace to learn from. And a lot of times AI goes on and on...

Plenty of what I "write" is AI slop too, and some I barely read myself, like merge request descriptions. But I keep the AI on a short leash to make it readable: a file of rules it must follow, custom rules, with lines like "Every word must earn its place" and "No filler words. No idiotic dashes mid-sentence." Plus a linter like vale that keeps the produced English simple for a team who mostly read it as a second language. None of it makes the text sound like me. It just makes it a lot less annoying to read.

Will it close that gap one day? Maybe. For now, if you want to say something personal there is no full automation. For everything else, it's good enough with some basic rules.