AI slop content isn’t just boring, it’s annoying.
Insulting, even.
Overuse of em dashes — like here (which I used to love, so this annoys me) — and formulaic sentence structures are both common signs.
“It’s not just a [some premise, e.g. 'new iphone’], it’s a [extra-emphasized premise, e.g. ‘game changer in how we think of phones’]”
Writing with AI and letting AI do the writing aren’t the same thing. Just because you can let AI do the writing, doesn’t mean you should.
Now, I do totally believe there’s a place for AI written content.
One good example would be bullet pointing key points in a slide deck, or distilling information from one source to be more scannable in another. Basically most ‘simplify or summarize’ use-cases (especially for marketing asset formats) are probably great for AI. But not thought leadership.
Thought leadership, perspective pieces and core creative content (i.e. messaging briefs to inform marketing collateral) really need to stay human. At least for now. And I believe forever.
But even if we want to keep things human, there’s a great place for AI.
In the following three examples, I’ll share my own approach to writing with AI while not letting AI do the writing for me.
1. The “Walk and Talk” method
It’s simple.
Pull out ChatGPT Voice Mode (I have ChatGPT Plus which is great for this, you may need it too) or some similar voice AI.
Go for a walk.
Walking is great. Clears the head, helps you think.
Tell the AI what you’re there to accomplish and the general topic you want to discuss. After it confirms its understanding, just talk out all of your thoughts.
When done, tell your AI that you want to retain your voice, key phrases and core foundational thoughts. This is an important step. You want the AI to know that you’re interested in sounding like you, inevitably.
Now ask the AI to create a polished outline of the thought leadership piece.
This should be based on your input and thinking just provided, with gaps filled in and common structural pieces covered.
If you feel like the outline is missing something (the AI should have just spoken that outline back to you), add it. Comment on that gap or point you want to reinforce and talk some more.
When done, ask the AI to actually write a short form article retaining your voice and covering the topic.
Take this, edit and update until it’s exactly what you’re looking for.
2. The “Prompt > Outline > Fill” method
Give AI this template as your prompt:
Your Assignment: [Short, clear instructions]
Title: [Provide one or put 'please include 3 options']
Guiding Points: [Unstructured list of things you know need to be covered. Talking points, references, stats, whatever.]
Format: [Voice, structure, word limit]
Style References: [if any - link to an article, or attach a doc or image, that provides a good idea of structure and tone]
Your Deliverable / Respond With: A table of two columns. Each row should represent a core part of the article / asset. In the left cell of the row, note the part and provide key talking points and guiding ideas as bullets. These will guide my own writing in the right-side cell, which should remain blank.
Take the table that is returned and place it into a word document. Fill in each right-side cell with your own copywriting, following the guidance given.
Finally, upload this document (or paste the table) back to your AI and request a cleaned, complete draft of the desired asset.
This may take a few rounds of editing (like any good writing) but is a great path to good copywriting.
3. The “Style-Guided Agent” method
This requires a more advanced AI chat vs. standard Gemini, Claude or ChatGPT.
ChatGPT Agent — new as of July 2025 — is a good one for this. You have to toggle it on from the chat view by clicking “Agent Mode”
Before getting into Agent Mode copywriting though, start with having Chat GPT’s standard model create a STYLE GUIDE for you.
Here’s what to write:
- I need a style guide for writing in my preferred voice, style, structure and tone.
- You can find references to my writing style in the following sources (either attach multiple articles of your own, or examples of writing you’d like to emulate, such as blog posts or published pieces you admire)
- Please analyze the reading level of the writing, the vocabulary used, the sentence structures, tone (professional, casual, confident, humorous, etc.), length of writing and section coverage, use of bullet points, summarization, exposition and topic reiteration and more.
- Please return a style guide which, if read without any further references, will result in consistently writing in a voice and style that sounds very close to my own writing style and voice. This should include reference statements, quotes etc. but should also be clear that these should not be re-used in the resulting work. The work that is built upon this style guide should stand on its own for the topic at hand, while being in our voice.
- Structure this in an efficient format for an AI model or Agent to review and utilize.Once you have this style guide returned, save it in Drive or another public repository and get a sharable link. If using drive, be sure to set permissions on that link for ‘anybody with link’ to access. Save the link.
Now you need a STANDARD PROMPT for requesting copywriting.
Go back to ChatGPT and provide the following:
- I need you to create a prompt that can be used repeatedly to create thought leadership [you may change this to state a more specific asset type like Newsletter, Blog, etc. if desired] in my style and tone by an AI Agent.
- This prompt should require the AI Agent to always reference my style guide here: [Link to the style guide we just created]
- This prompt should have placeholders at the top, which I will update every time the prompt is used, for topic of interest, reference source links, and any style or deliverable notes I wish to add.
- [If you're doing a series of content] This prompt should require the AI Agent to review my recent content here [provide a source link -- I use a Google sheet that as the title and description of all past pieces] to ensure that the piece we prepare is distinct, novel and not overly redundant to recent articles. We should limit how much of our past content the agent reviews, within reason.
- The AI Agent, using this prompt, should also always start its work by researching the topic online to identify potential reference material, supporting arguments, stats, news, etc. that might improve the resulting piece. Once you have a prompt template you like, save it for future use.
Use the prompt when ready, get your draft, treat it like a draft.
This one is advanced but a bit of a slippery slope. Make it your aim to get a good starting point for you to review and affect, line by line. It might help to tune the prompt to output an outline (like in option 2 above) instead of a draft.
Hope this helps. How are you writing?
