{"slug": "jfks-ai-voice", "title": "JFK’s AI Voice", "summary": "John F. Kennedy's iconic speeches, including his 1961 inaugural address and 1962 moon speech at Rice University, exhibit rhetorical techniques—symmetry, parallelism, antithesis, repetition, and reversal—that modern AI systems have absorbed from speechwriter Ted Sorensen. The overuse of these flourishes for mundane topics is a problem, but likely an easy fix, according to the analysis.", "body_md": "# JFK’s AI Voice\n\nFrom Kennedy’s 1961 inaugural:\n\n- “Ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country.”\n- “Let us never negotiate out of fear. But let us never fear to negotiate.”\n- “United, there is little we cannot do… Divided, there is little we can do.”\n- “If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich.\n\nand from the 1962 moon speech at Rice University;\n\n- We choose to do these things not because they are easy but because they are hard.\n\nand from Lyndon Johnson’s inaugural speech:\n\n- John Kennedy’s death commands what his life conveyed—that America must move forward.\n- On the 20th day of January, in 1961, John F. Kennedy told his countrymen that our national work would not be finished ‘in the first thousand days, nor in the life of this administration, nor even perhaps in our lifetime on this planet.’ But, he said, ‘let us begin.’ Today, in this moment of new resolve, I would say to all my fellow Americans, let us continue.\n\nSound familiar?\n\nWere John F. Kennedy’s speeches written by an AI? Probably not. But were AI’s trained on the speech writer Ted Sorensen? It would appear so. Or to be more accurate, AIs have absorbed the Sorensen toolkit: symmetry, parallelism, antithesis, repetition, and the neatly turned reversal.\n\nSorensen is considered a great stylist, and these are iconic lines. The problem with AI voice is not the techniques themselves. It is the overuse of them—their deployment to describe a trip to 7-Eleven with the same rhetorical flourishes once used to send men to the moon.\n\nI suspect that will be an easy problem to fix, so don’t expect AI voice to continue.\n\nHat tip: [murgh](http://@candrianillborn)", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/jfks-ai-voice", "canonical_source": "https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/08/jfks-ai-voice.html?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=jfks-ai-voice", "published_at": "2026-08-09 11:26:05+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-08-09 12:24:32.026225+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["generative-ai", "large-language-models"], "entities": ["John F. Kennedy", "Ted Sorensen", "Lyndon Johnson", "Rice University"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/jfks-ai-voice", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/jfks-ai-voice.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/jfks-ai-voice.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/jfks-ai-voice.jsonld"}}