Stop Copy-Pasting from AI. Use Your Human Brain.
AI is doubling in power every three months. Extraordinary? Yes. Useful? Absolutely. But dangerous if you hand it too much authority over your work and rely on it for all your content.
If you want to understand why, listen to the brain experts on the DOAC podcast. It’s a sharp reminder of what happens when we stop thinking for ourselves. Your brain weakens significantly. Your creativity stalls. You stop leading and start outsourcing.
From a marketing perspective though, the impact of AI is extraordinary. Platforms like ChatGPT can act as resourceful marketing colleagues. They’re fast, eager and full of ideas. But they’re not the expert. They don’t know your business, your customers’ pain points, your lived experience or the nuance of your brand voice. That’s on you.
So how do you use AI properly?
Think of it like a colleague and interact with it. A good colleague brings energy, research and fresh ideas, but they still need direction. The value comes from how you work with them.
My Guidelines
Give a proper brief. Don’t just type “write me a post.” Be very clear and detailed. Who’s your audience? What’s the goal? What’s the message? What’s the tone?
Interact with it. Treat it as a conversation. Ask questions. Challenge answers. Push back. The gold usually comes after the first few drafts.
Stay editor-in-chief. You need to be the creator, not just the filter. Never accept output blindly. Your judgement and strategy decide what makes it through.
Add the human touch. Inject personality, opinion and story. That’s what makes it yours and what makes it worth reading.
Respect originality. Anyone can churn out words with AI, so what makes yours stand out? Your perspective. Your expertise. Your pride in what you publish.
Build a relationship with it. AI learns from the way you use it. Train it in your style, feed it your language, refine it. The more you shape it, the more useful it becomes.
Protect your thinking. Do your research. Form your own ideas. Draft something yourself. Use AI to sharpen, not to substitute.
My Experience
I started my career in print journalism in the 1990s. Back then, stories were filed over fixed-line phones and fax machines. Publishing a feature or an article took a whole team: writers, editors, sub-editors, editorial assistants and researchers. Every word mattered, and the final piece was rarely the author’s first draft.
Now I have AI in the room instead. Not as my ghostwriter, but as a brilliant editorial team. It doesn’t tire of endless article discussions. It checks sources, flags if someone has already covered an idea, and makes sure my spelling is consistent (and in British English, thank you very much).
But it doesn’t write my articles. I love writing too much. What it does is what a newsroom once did: sharpen, support, speed things up. Without the editorial drama.
The Bottom Line
Use AI for what it does brilliantly - ideas, speed, editing. But don’t hand over your judgement. Don’t stop thinking for yourself. The brands that will win in a world drowning in AI-generated noise are the ones that never lose the human touch.
Want support sharpening your story? I mentor small businesses and independents to create authentic, human content that cuts through the noise.
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