AI is a hot topic right now, and the climate around it can feel pretty charged. People have big feelings about it, and it seems like everyone has an opinion they’re ready to share. This post takes no side. It isn’t here to debate AI, and it won’t tell you that you should use it or that you shouldn’t. It also isn’t a case against hiring a copywriter, which is a great choice and one plenty of people will keep making. Wherever you land, you don’t have to justify it here.
For those who do choose to use AI, what follows is a set of tools for getting more out of it and keeping your own voice in the writing it helps with. Most people I know who have tried an AI writing tool did it once, read what came back, and closed the tab. The sentences were fine, but they didn’t sound like anyone you’d want to have coffee with.
Why AI Needs to Get to Know You First
AI tools are built on an enormous amount of general writing, so without context they reach for the most average version of everything. What they write is only as specific as what you give them. Teaching one about your business and your voice up front is what makes the writing sound like yours. It can take an afternoon, or a few weeks if you’d rather go slowly.
Four Steps to Teach AI About You
Each step builds on the one before it. If you decide to follow along, the first thing you’ll need to do is open a fresh chat so that no old assumptions come along, and tell the AI what you’re about to do.
One thing to sort out before you paste anything in: some tools can use your conversations to train their models, depending on the plan and settings, so check your privacy settings first. Leave out client names, contracts, and private messages. Client photos are a separate matter, and they deserve their own consent conversation.
1. Introduce Your Business
Treat this like onboarding a new assistant. Tell the AI you’re going to teach it about your business so it can help with things like emails and social posts.
What to share:
- The basics: your business name, location, service area, and what you offer.
- A bit of your background, pasted in from your résumé or LinkedIn profile.
- Anything about you that shapes how you work, like your personality or the communities you belong to.
- A specific picture of the people you love working with, since “everyone” gives it very little to go on, aka your client avatar.
Action items:
- Paste in your answers, or copy the text straight from your website.
- Ask it to tell you what it understands so far and what questions it still has for you.
- Ask it to be honest about what it sees, including any blind spots, since these tools lean toward telling you what you want to hear. It only knows what you’ve shared, so treat its answers as a starting point.
2. Share Your Why and What Sets You Apart
Once it knows what you do, give it the reason you do it. If you don’t have a mission or a set of values written down, you can ask it to interview you one question at a time and draft something from your answers. You don’t have to keep what it writes. Having something to react to often gets you further than a blank page does.
What to share:
- A mission and a set of values you’d be comfortable saying out loud to a client.
- Specifics about what sets you apart from others in your field.
- Real examples, like past testimonials and writing that sounds like you on a good day, since showing teaches it faster than describing.
Action items:
- Paste in what you have, or ask it to interview you if you’re starting from scratch.
- Ask how well your values line up with everything else you’ve shared.
- Ask for a short description of what makes you different that you could use in a bio.
3. Build Your Voice Guide
This is the step that matters most if you care about how you sound. Describe your voice in your own words. It doesn’t have to be polished. Something like “warm and a little dry” is plenty. Then let it study the real thing.
What to share:
- Blogs or any large copy you’ve written, which the AI can use to identify how you speak. Five to ten pieces that people have told you sounded exactly like you is a good target, such as blog posts, captions, client emails, or website copy.
- Your own description of your voice, in plain words.
Action items:
- Gather your writing samples into one chat.
- Ask the AI to describe the style it sees, pointing to specific lines. Correct it where it’s off, and tell it what it got right.
- Ask it to write up a voice guide and give the voice a name, so you and the AI have a shared shorthand.
- Save the guide in your AI tool’s project space or memory settings if it has them, and keep a copy in a document you can find. Tools handle memory differently, and some don’t keep anything between conversations, so you may need to paste it in at the start of a new chat.
Once you have a guide, it becomes your anchor. If the writing ever starts sounding generic, hand it back and ask the AI to try again. Update it as your voice and your business change.
4. Add a List of Things to Avoid
Even a well-taught AI falls back on certain habits. Some are words that show up so often readers have started to notice them without knowing why. Others are sentence shapes, like lists that always arrive in groups of three, or a line that sets up a contrast just to sound wise. Once you know what to look for, you’ll start seeing them everywhere, including in your own writing.
What to share:
- A short list of words that make you wince. The list belongs to you, so mine has a couple of words on it that grate on me, and that’s allowed. This list can also continually grow and be added to the AI’s memory.
- The sentence patterns you never want to see.
- A plain instruction to avoid all of it, including plurals and other forms of each word.
Action items:
- Write down the words and patterns you notice and dislike as you read AI output.
- Add the list to your voice guide.
- Keep reading with your own eyes. The list won’t catch every slip.
Getting Better Results Once It Knows You
A few habits make everyday use smoother.
- Say who a piece is for and where it will be used, since the same message reads differently in an email than on a website.
- Ask for a few options instead of one answer, then mix and match the parts you like.
- Talk back to it. If a draft is close, say what to change, the same way you’d give feedback to a person.
- Try it on your own drafts too. Paste in something you wrote and ask it to tighten it while keeping your phrasing.
- Start a fresh chat when a conversation gets tangled.
Make Your Online Listings Easy to Understand
Something worth knowing about business profiles and directory listings: more and more, the first reader may not be a person. When someone asks an AI tool for a photographer who is good with nervous people, it relies on whatever it can find written about the businesses in that area. No one can promise an AI tool will recommend you, but a vague profile gives it nothing to work with, and a clear one gives it something to go on. Your voice guide can help you write each part of a listing with real specifics. For more on this, see our post on how AI search is changing photographer visibility.
Here are the most important areas to focus on:
- Name your city and the towns around it as well as the broad region.
- Say who you enjoy working with and what that looks like day to day.
- Share your philosophy on pricing, even if you’d rather not post exact numbers.
- Answer directory FAQ questions with real details.
- Choose testimonials with specifics in them, because “she was amazing” could be said about anyone.
- Lead your photo gallery with the work you want more of.
- Keep your personal bio separate from your business description, so one says what the business does and the other tells people who’s behind it.
- Claim your Google Business profile and keep recent reviews coming in.
A safe answer is comfortable to write and gives a person nothing to remember or software nothing to match. Details give both something to hold onto.
Keep Your Hands on It
Treat everything AI writes as a draft. Read it slowly and notice how it feels. If something sounds off to you, trust that.
A few habits worth keeping:
- Check every fact before it goes near a client, including dates, prices, and policies, because these tools will sometimes make things up with total confidence or rely on outdated information.
- Leave room for the human parts, like the small aside or the joke only you would make.
- Decide how you want to handle telling clients when AI helped with your writing, so you have an answer ready if someone asks.
- Take breaks between steps and let it settle.
AI can help you get words on the page faster, which leaves more time for real connection with the people you work with.
Where to Start
If you want to try it, start small. Pick one page of your website or one profile, teach the AI about your work first, and see how it feels. You’ll know pretty quickly whether it’s saving you time or making more work, and you can decide from there.
