Keeping Your Voice While Writing With AI

I’ve set a goal for myself to write at least 1 long form piece of content every week to post on my site and leverage across the social platforms for my personal and company pages. Long form writing has never been a skill I’ve strongly developed and I would in no way say I’m good at it.  That in mind, I’ve made a real effort to generate authentic and useful content that is in my voice. I’ve found that it’s helped me center my thoughts, generate ideas, and bring clarity in the initiatives I’m working on with teams. It’s been an interesting exercise that has already paid off in many ways both for the business and my own development. It takes focus and plenty of time though.

It would be really easy to prompt an AI tool and get back a post. It would be low effort and I could easily check the box for my goal. You see it all over LinkedIn. For many cases, it’s probably even good enough. It is always an easy read, it’s skimmable, and it’s getting harder and harder to tell. It’s some easily palatable junk food type reading. That’s not my goal with these posts. 

I am using AI as my editor, not for ideas.

For the posts I write on here, they come straight from me first. I collect ideas all the time.  When one of the ideas feels the most interesting to me that week, I start by creating a draft in the Apple notes app. From there, I just write out all my thoughts. Sometimes there are paragraphs, single lines, run on sentences. It’s all over the place. I am usually far enough ahead on that first draft that I can let it sit a couple days to review and edit it before any AI touches it. I give it a form I’m almost comfortable posting by itself. I’d guess 90% of the final post is from the draft before any AI suggested edits. Instead of passing a draft to someone else, I leverage AI to make sure the writing is clear, useful, and to point out gaps in the narrative. 

Once I feel I’ve written out my thoughts and have got a solid draft, that is when I engage AI to help me. I toss the full draft into ChatGPT and I am very specific in my prompt to place the draft in the Canvas and that it is not allowed to edit it. I ask it to review my draft, give it some background on my intent, tell it to ask me any questions it has about the post.

From there, a good back and forth happens in the chat. The LLM gets a better understanding of my ideas, the goals, and the audience. It’s already causing me to reflect and edit the canvas before it’s given me any feedback. Then we work through some of the larger problems across the whole post to tighten things up. If I feel like it needs more work, I narrow in and go section by section to clean it up. I’ve really trained it to give me feedback and not just attempt to rewrite or provide large chunks of text for me to copy & paste. It’s tempting but I’ve found it starts to drift from the intent that lives in my head towards something else.

Sometimes I go deeper with it as an editor. Other times I get annoyed with it and only use it for the high level feedback. It depends on whether it feels aligned with my goals. AI usage for these posts works best as an editor, but not as the source for the material. 

What I have found is that if you lean too far into its feedback, you can feel the writing get more generic and lose your voice. It pulls you towards a different direction in a very subtle way. It might even be a better direction from a sales or marketing lense. It’s something a reader wouldn’t notice but as someone wanting to provide quality content in my voice, I need it to feel like mine.

Once I’ve got it in a good spot, I will have it generate suggestions for me for the title and the post excerpt on the site. For the LinkedIn posts, I write a draft and follow a quick editing review with AI.

Here is how I would recommend writing authentic content with AI as your editor

1. Get your thoughts out in a simple note taking app. Maybe even pen & paper if that’s your thing.
2. Edit the draft on your own. Give it the shape you’re looking for.
3. Toss it in to your favorite LLM and be explicit about what you want it to do. I've provided the prompt I use below.
4. As you chat with it, make your edits in the Canvas
5. The LLM will never stop so you have to decide at a certain point that you’re done. It will continue to refine, review and try to keep you engaged endlessly. 

Here is the prompt I used to start editing this post. Keep in mind that ChatGPT knows enough about me that it pulls from other chats and memories so you may have to be more explicit:

I'm working on my next post for my website. I am focused on AI themes across my writing. This week focuses on authenticity when writing with AI. Please take the draft below. Place it in a canvas without editing. Then I would like to work with you on editing this. You will give me feedback in the chat and I will incorporate changes in the canvas. Before we start, ask me any questions you have about the material or my goals so we are aligned.

This is how I handle the writing for the posts on this site because it’s an exercise in reflection and idea generation that helps me be a better leader for teams. There are plenty of cases and types of communication where prompting an LLM to generate a post or message is the solution. I put time into the writing because it’s important to me. It’s not a moral dilemma or judgement but a case of using the right tool at the right time.

This method lets me keep and show my authenticity which I do believe is going to be an important feature moving forward. A typo even slipped through in last week’s post. We all want to feel a connection to others and finding ways to show your team and the people around you who you are, the more engaged you’ll be with them. It leads to stronger connections whether you’re selling something, delivering something, or leading someone. 

If no one knows who you are, flaws and all, you might as well be the AI.

If you need help understanding how AI fits in your workflows, your writing, and within your tools while keeping the parts you want to focus on, let’s schedule a call and talk through how AI fits within your world.