Copy that, words we didn’t choose
We didn't learn to sound like this from the robots. We learned it from legal documents, academic papers, and technical documentation. The kind of institutional writing that taught us to mistake impersonality for authority. Language models trained on that same writing and handed it back to us, amplified. Now we're mimicking it, without noticing, and passing it on. This talk is about that loop: where it comes from, what it costs, and how to interrupt it. It's for anyone who has started to feel their words don't quite sound like their own anymore.
Justin teaches design students to write and talk about their work in a way anyone can understand, not like they're defending a thesis. He works with students at Prague School of Creative Communication (VŠKK), where he focuses on design writing, brand voice, and getting them to stop writing like institutions. He works in content design and UX writing at Apify, where he builds tools to catch the kind of language that sounds professional but means nothing. He thinks of language as a craft, not only functional, but intentional. At the end of the day, broadly speaking, he has a lot to say about the words we inherit, repeat, and either overthink or overuse.