Why everyone's email started sounding the same
Two years ago your writing was yours. It had a rhythm, a set of words you overused, a way you opened when you were in a hurry. Now a large share of what arrives in any inbox has passed through a language model, and models have a house style.
That style is not bad writing. It is competent, grammatical, and completely characterless, because it is the average of everything ever written. It hedges, it balances, it says nothing in more words than nothing requires.
The result is that fluent, polished email has stopped being a signal of effort. If anything it now reads as the opposite: the more perfectly balanced the paragraphs, the more likely nobody thought about you while writing them.
What the scarce thing is now
Writing that sounds like a specific person. Not better writing, not more correct writing. Recognisable writing.
This is the whole reason a voice profile exists. Ask a model to write an email and you get the average. Tell it that this person writes eleven word sentences, never opens with a greeting, is blunt about money and never apologises for their prices, and you get something a reader will not flinch at.
The email you were not hunting in each round was written that way. The one you were hunting is what you get from every AI email tool that does not know who you are, which is almost all of them.
Questions
Were any of these written by a real person?
No, and that matters enough to say plainly. Every email in this game was generated. A version of this game where one option is genuinely human would be a better hook, but we cannot build it honestly, and a site that claims a human wrote something a machine wrote has no business lecturing anyone about AI slop.
So what is the actual difference between the options?
Whether the model was given a voice profile. One of the two was written against a description of how one specific person writes: their sentence length, whether they greet by name, how blunt they are about money, what they never say. The other was written with no profile at all, in the register a model reaches for by default. Same brief, same model, one difference.
What are the tells?
Opening pleasantries like hoping the email finds you well. Stock transitions such as regarding, moreover, at this particular moment in time. Rule-of-three lists. Perfectly balanced paragraphs. Closing with an invitation to not hesitate to reach out. And most reliably: length without specifics, where a long message never actually says a number, a date or a name.
Why does this matter if the writing is technically fine?
Because people can feel it even when they cannot name it, and what they feel is that you did not write it. For a founder whose relationships are the business, an email that reads as generated says you did not think this was worth your attention. That is a worse outcome than replying slowly.
How do I stop sounding like the default one?
Write shorter, be specific, and cut every sentence that is managing how the message will feel rather than saying something. If you use an AI to draft, give it something real to work from: how you actually write, what you never say, who you are writing to. That is what a voice profile is, and it is the difference this game is testing.