What happens when everyone taps into the same brain?
Yesterday I ditched my computer entirely and spent the day with two of my favorite humans – both mentors, both friends, both currently living in Portugal for the next month.
And one whom I met in person for the first time ever.
Quick story on Gemma.
The first person to ever expose me to the world of AI was a woman named Gemma.
At the top of 2023, I’m laying on my Brooklyn couch when I see an Instagram ad for an “AI Summit.”
Normally I scroll past ads like a normal human.
But something made me click. Then actually BUY the thing.
That purchase…no exaggeration…actually changed my life. It was the spark I needed to be off to the races. Gemma was truly at the forefront of what’s now everywhere.
Fast forward, Gemma and I became actual friends bonded by:
– adventure travel (she moved her family to France for a year from Canada and now Portugal for a program called Boundless.)
-AI (I headlined her summit this year & we both sell AI products.)
-Storytelling (I worked with her on helping her get deeper on who she is and what she stands for.)
Then there’s Antonio:
I used to produce business stories for him when we both worked at NBC in NY.
I’d run camera while he masterfully interviewed founders like Tony Hsieh (RIP) from Zappos and Ari Weinzweig from Zingerman’s (a Michigan deli with a cult following).
Antonio’s now a bestselling author – his book just came out in Portuguese! – and a professional keynote speaker.
Antonio also lost everything in the LA fires last year and he told us over lunch he had an uncomfortable realization about himself this year.
He’d been giving a speech for years about “don’t wait for trauma to chase your dreams” while his own dream of “traveling and living abroad with family” never made it off the vision board.
Turns out trauma became the catalyst. (but YOU don’t wait for it!!🤣)
Anyway, in between shrieks of laughter and me being way too loud because having another American at the table will do that…we started geeking out on AI, business and personal brand stuff.
Then Antonio dropped this question and we all went silent:
“What happens when everyone is tapping into the same brain?”
Each of us work with speakers, business owners, people trying to build something meaningful.
And we all agreed on this:
LLMs are quietly making brilliant people sound… flat. Identical.
**LLM means large language models and refer to the companies that power Chatgpt, Claude & Gemini, etc.
Because they’re all asking ChatGPT to “make it better, more inspiring, more thought leadership*y” and getting variations of the same statistical center.
Just the other day, I noticed a Substack writer whose work I used to look forward to each week suddenly adopt that familiar cadence and perfect poetic set-up that IS NOT her real voice.
And I clocked it immediately because she’s my friend and sassy as hell IRL and up until last month was also totally herself in her writing.
LLMs don’t create insight or provocation on their own.
They’re prediction engines trained on patterns.
So when you ask for an “inspiring keynote,” they don’t reach into your lived experience – they complete the most common version of what “inspiring” usually sounds like.
Which means:
🚫 your contrarian take gets softened.
🚫 your specific struggle becomes a universal platitude.
🚫 your weird, memorable details get replaced with crowd-pleasing clichés.
Your big ideas become predictable.
Brilliant founders and subject matter experts with REAL insights are accidentally homogenizing themselves because we’re cutting corners and not doing the hard work BEFORE we put our chatGPT*ed idea into a story or a marketable speech.
They’re taking stories that could stop you in your tracks and turning them into posts or thought leadership pieces that could be written by absolutely anyone in their niche.
Your breakthrough idea for 2026 can’t be something ChatGPT could generate for your competitor.
AI is incredible at finishing thoughts.
It’s terrible at finding the thought worth finishing.
In 2026 it’s not about using the LLMs or using AI (we are all using it) but rather knowing what parts of your thinking you WILL NOT OUTSOURCE to these LLMs.
What’s the perspective only YOU could have? The story that couldn’t come from anyone else’s life?
Because the moment you hand an unfinished idea or a surface level perspective to a prediction engine, you’re no longer tapping into your brain.
You’re tapping into everyone else’s.
And that was the real weight behind Antonio’s question at the table.
What happens when everyone is tapping into the same brain?
You already know the answer.
But more importantly….what can you do to avoid this?
More thoughts coming soon…
XO
Patrice
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