In the world of content creation, AI can be your best assistant: helping you come up with ideas, accelerating the research process, helping you write, and helping you edit. AI can also torpedo your thought leadership. The key to avoiding that fate is this: leverage Artificial Intelligence to highlight your human and emotional intelligence.
I had the privilege of speaking at the Fast Company Innovation Festival in New York City last month on this topic. If you missed the workshop, here are some key takeaways:
Make Content Unique To You
AI is powerful, but your superpower is YOU. AI can never be you, even if it’s impersonating you fairly well. The biggest value is getting content that helps you shine, that attracts ideal clients, and isn’t vague, wooden or robotic. But how can you make content that is unique to you? Here are a few ways:
AI Can’t Know You If You Don’t Know Yourself
I help my clients identify and tap into their strengths through my customized messaging and branding system. We do a deep dive into who you are, what makes you unique, all to figure out what we plan to amplify and show to the world. If you don’t know who you are, how will AI create content for you? The phrase “Garbage In, Garbage Out” is especially true with AI. “Garbage” in this context is bland, generic inputs. Chaos goes in, confusion comes out.
Do your own Mad Libs, in which you tell AI who you are, your job, your audience and your tone of voice. For example, I’ll tell ChatGPT that I am a video expert and public speaking coach. I run workshops and consult with clients to help them with video strategy and public speaking. I write in a professional but light tone of voice. I also add that I don’t like a lot of puns (warning to you all: you can get some corny output). Tech experts can help you further hone your prompts, but you need that understanding of who you are as a starting point.
Run it through a Checklist
Run any creative output from AI through a checklist. My checklist involves asking three questions: my S.A.G. Checklist. The AI output must meet this criteria to get a thumbs up.
My S.A.G. checklist asks these three questions: Does it “Sound” like Me? Do I “Agree” With It? It is “Generic”?
Does it “Sound” like Me? Ask yourself is this something I would talk about? Does this match up with my area of expertise and is it what my audience wants?
Do I “Agree” With It? We’ve all gotten some AI content that makes us shake our heads. Maybe you don’t agree with the analysis, maybe you have a contradictory viewpoint.
It is “Generic”? Generic in this case is bad. The goal of being on social media is showing people your unique professional and personal POV. Being generic means anyone in your field could have posted that piece of content, and will post the same exact thing.
Adding a Human Touch Helps to Stand Out in a Sea of Robotic Content
As more and more people adopt this technology, you’ll need to lean in harder to what makes us human. No, not your baby toe, not your obsession with beanie babies, but rather your unique personality, skills, and capabilities. Improve your verbal communication skills in addition to your technological skills to compete in the years to come.
Injecting your human touch into AI will help you not only scale your content to market your business but also help the world—including potential clients and future bosses—understand who you are and your distinct personality.
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