How to be different when you use AI for writing

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One of the big criticisms levelled at using AI to help with your writing is that it ends up being very generic. Something that could have been written by anyone.

I’m going to suggest that’s only true if you use it very badly. And very lazily.

Sure, if you use a simple prompt to ask your AI to do some research and write an email or an article on a topic without inputting anything of your own then it’s going to sound very much like something anyone could have written just using similar prompts.

But that’s not what you should do. Obvs.

In my experience there are 5 big things you can do to make sure your writing is different to what anyone else is doing.

The first is to focus on your own ideas and insights and models.

In other words if I’m writing about ideas and insights that are unique to me then it doesn’t matter if AI is doing a lot of the heavy lifting of putting the words to it, the resulting article or email will be unique to me too.

Imagine if you were Michael Porter publishing your first article on competitive strategy. Or Peter Senge introducing the concept of the learning organisation.

Would it matter if a lot of the writing was done by AI? Would that make their ideas any less powerful or useful? I’m going to suggest not.

The value of those articles is in the novelty and usefulness of the ideas they share - not in the style of writing. No one is going to look at Senge’s groundbreaking ideas and think “yeah, it may be a completely new way of looking at organisations, but I’m not going to use it because the writing seems a bit stilted”.

In fact, for an ideas person who isn’t necessarily a great communicator, AI could be a godsend. It’ll allow them to get their brilliant ideas out to whoever needs them without getting bogged down with the writing side.

The second way of differentiating is to use your own unique stories and examples.

One of my most successful and impactful emails was where I told a simple story about Kathy and me clearing our garden and what it taught me about sometimes needing to just grit your teeth and get on with the hard work.

The point wasn’t a new one. I certainly wasn’t the first person to say that sometimes you just have to get stuck in and get some hard work done if you want to achieve your goals. There’s probably a cave painting somewhere illustrating the same point.

But the story illustrated the point well and it was completely unique to me. It not only got across an important point, it shared a little bit about my life that helped readers feel that bit closer to me.

Surely AI can’t help with something like that?

Well…it turns out it can.

As an experiment I asked Claude to write a short email about how you sometimes need to grit your teeth and work hard to achieve your goals, and to illustrate it with a story about Kathy and me clearing our garden.

I then fed it the details of the story. Why we wanted the garden cleared. The mess it was in. The fact Kathy was pregnant at the time. Our pride in what we’d achieve afterwards and what we’ve gone on to do with the garden.

Basically I brain dumped the elements of the story and asked Claude to put them together into something coherent.

And it did.

I don’t think what it came up with was quite as good as my original. But it was perhaps 80% as good. 90% after a few simple edits.

And the point is that it was super quick and easy. I didn’t have to agonise over the writing like I did with the original. It literally took less than 5 minutes to create something nearly as good as one of my best emails ever.

And most importantly, the end result was unique to me. It had been written by AI, but the story was all mine.

The third way to differentiate is to use your taste.

I’ve mentioned before that I’m a fan of Billy Oppenheimer’s SIX at 6 newsletter. Every week Billy pulls together an eclectic collection of stories and examples all related to a common theme or learning point.

This week he illustrated the “Law of Reverse Effect” with stories about philosopher Émile Coué, Mozart, skateboarder Rodney Muller, Olympic speed skater Dan Jansen and comedian Chris Rock.

None of those are Billy’s stories. All of them have been told before.

But that particular selection of them and their relation to the point about often getting the opposite of what you try for was unique to Billy.

I’m pretty sure he didn’t use AI to write the newsletter. But it wouldn’t matter if he did. What was important and unique to him was his taste. His ability to pick out an interesting and entertaining selection of stories to use to illustrate his point.

The words he used to describe them weren’t so important. His choice of what to include and exclude was. As was the breadth of his knowledge and the quality of his research that gave him a solid shortlist to choose from.

The fourth way to differentiate is to get your AI to write like you.

I covered this in detail here so I won’t rehash it again. The point is that it’s possible to train your AI to write in a style that’s very close to your own.

And certainly after a little bit of editing it can feel a lot like your own unique style.

That means that with the right prompting you can make sure your writing sounds different to anyone else’s, even if a lot of it has been done by AI.

The fifth way to differentiate is through unique and better prompts.

This is probably more relevant for articles than for emails but as I illustrated here, how you prompt your AI can make a huge difference to the quality and depth of the output you get.

It can be the difference between a short, bland article that adds nothing new and the most in-depth, comprehensive and valuable article written on a topic.

I know this is true because in Kathy’s business that’s exactly what we’ve been doing.

And it’s allowed a tiny little business like ours (Kathy, me and our youngest son working part-time) to produce articles that would have needed a small army of writers and researchers before. That are an order of magnitude better than anything else out there. And rather pleasingly, that Google seems to like too.

These are the 5 methods I’ve used to make sure my writing remains different while using AI to help. I’m sure there are more.

And as I’ve written them down it’s struck me that far from making everyone’s writing seem the same, if used right, AI can actually enhance your differentiation.

That’s because it enables people with great ideas, great stories and great taste to communicate those ideas clearly even if they’re not naturally great writers.

So instead of a world where good writers with perhaps mediocre ideas dominate, we’re levelling the playing field so that people with great ideas can get them expressed well.

Food for thought I hope.

- Ian