How to Use AI Without Everyone Knowing

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Jun 25

"That sounds like ChatGPT." shouldn't be the most memorable part of anything you publish.

The internet is full of advice on how to make AI sound more human.

You'll find endless prompt libraries, lists of words to avoid, and tricks for making AI writing less obvious. Some of that advice is genuinely helpful, but I think it's focused on the wrong problem. This conversation goes far beyond blog posts and social media. The same thing is happening to our websites, branding, messaging, and the way we communicate our businesses.

The more I use AI, the more I've realized it has very clear strengths. It's fantastic at organizing ideas, summarizing information, editing rough drafts, brainstorming, and explaining complex topics more clearly.

Where it struggles is the part that makes your content memorable: discernment, lived experience, noticing patterns, understanding people, and saying something genuinely new.

In this post, I'll show you how to use AI as a writing partner instead of a ghostwriter. We'll cover what AI should do, what it should never do, and a few of the prompts that'll make your writing stronger without making it sound like everyone else's.

Here’s what’s inside:

The secret to standing out in an AI world

What AI is bad at
The secret to better outputs
Using AI to build your website
Infusing your personality

1.Start with a solid brand identity.

Using AI for your business goes far beyond writing. It's easy to think this is just about blog posts or social media captions, but I don't think it is.

For years, business owners have looked at someone else's success and tried to reverse-engineer it. We copied website layouts, borrowed messaging, recreated offers, and tried to capture the same look and feel as the businesses we admired. AI simply made that process faster.

Now I'm seeing courses that promise to build your entire brand with AI in an afternoon. Your logos, fonts, colors, even your offers, emails, your content calendar—all can be generated in a few prompts.

The thing is, good branding goes FAR beyond your visual identity. And it takes time and thought. It takes conversations with customers, paying attention to patterns, understanding why people choose you instead of someone else, and figuring out what you actually want to be known for. AI can absolutely help you organize those ideas, but it can't tell you what they are.

The very first step in branding is clarity. Who are you? Who do you serve? What problem do you solve? Why should someone choose you over the business down the street? Those aren't writing prompts. They're foundational pieces of your entire business.

Once you know those answers on a deep level, AI becomes incredibly helpful. It can polish your words, strengthen your messaging, and help you communicate more clearly. But if you skip the thinking and ask AI to answer those questions for you, you'll end up with a brand that sounds the same as everyone else, without ever becoming memorable.

Let’s say you ask ChatGPT something like “Rewrite the homepage copy for my wedding photography business. I create timeless images and give my clients a personalized experience.”

It sounds better. Cleaner. Punchier. More professional

And yet…it still sounds like everybody else. Because across your state this week, 47 other photographers ALSO asked ChatGPT to do the same thing, and received essentially the same paragraph.

Everything I’m writing in this entire blog post boils down to one main skill – PAY ATTENTION TO PEOPLE. That’s what you build your brand upon. That’s where you gather content from. That’s where your brand values come from. That’s where you

Pay very close attention to:

what customers ask
where they hesitate
why they buy
what they misunderstand
what they thank you for afterward
the words they use to describe their problem
the reason they recommend you

I’ll go ten toes deep here. Good branding is thoughtful and takes more than a day. Sorry. But you can’t outsource this to a robot if you want to stand out.

And on the flip side, I don’t think the businesses that stand out will be the ones refusing to use AI, either. The sweet spot is somewhere in the middle: know your brand and customers well enough to give AI something original to work with.

2. Give AI something only you could write.

Most prompts start with something like, "Write a blog post about..." That's convenient, but it also guarantees your starting point (and topic/point of view) is the same as everyone else's. AI pulls from the information it's been trained on, which means the first draft is usually an average of what's already been written.

Instead, spend ten minutes collecting your own raw material before you ever open ChatGPT. Figure out the point you're trying to make, the opinion you're willing to defend, or the question your customers keep asking. What did a client say this week that made you stop and think? What mistake have you made that you wouldn't want someone else to repeat? What do people in your industry keep saying that you disagree with?

Those ^^ are the things worth handing to AI. Those are the things that AI cannot come up with, and what will set you apart from everyone else who’s using it.

Instead of saying:
👉🏼"Write a blog post about choosing a website designer."

Try something like:
👉🏼"Three clients told me they almost hired the cheapest designer because they thought websites were all basically the same. I want to explain why that's usually the most expensive decision they can make. Here's what I saw happen in each situation..."

👉🏼"I've noticed that almost every client I work with buries the reason someone should choose them halfway down the About page. I think they're doing it because they're trying to sound professional, but it's actually making them forgettable."

👉🏼"Everyone says you need to post more content. I think most businesses don't have a content problem. I think they have a clarity problem. Help me organize these thoughts..."

See the difference?

None of those prompts ask AI to come up with the idea. They already contain the idea. AI's job is simply to help organize, clarify, and strengthen something that already belongs to you.

The businesses that stand out over the next few years won't be the ones with the best prompts. They'll be the ones with the best observations. This is also where a good brand strategist, copywriter, or web designer earns their keep: they know how to ask the questions that pull this information out of you. Anyone can ask ChatGPT to explain a topic. Very few people can explain something they've actually lived, noticed, wrestled with, or changed their mind about.

That's the sticky part that gets readers to click the inquire button, and it's the part your competitors can't copy.

3. Give AI a job.

This is where we show appropriate execution. Give me 20 headline options based on this positioning. Help me organize these services. Look at these customer interviews and flag recurring objections. Help me turn this project into a case study. Tighten this copy without changing the promise.

Most prompts sound something like, "Write a blog post about..." or "Write an email introducing my new service." That's a lot to ask. You're expecting AI to come up with the idea, organize it, write it, edit it, and somehow make it sound like you—all in one prompt.

Instead, think of AI as another person on your team. You wouldn't ask your graphic designer to answer customer support emails, and you probably wouldn't ask your bookkeeper to redesign your website. Give AI one clear responsibility at a time, and you'll almost always get a better result.

Give me 20 headline options based on this positioning.
Help me organize these services into a clearer hierarchy.
Look at these customer interviews and flag recurring objections.
Turn this finished client project into a case study using these results and this testimonial.
Tighten this homepage copy without changing the promise.
Brainstorm keyword ideas around this problem my customers actually have so I can take them into Keyword Planner and research the real data.

One of my favorite ways to suggest ChatGPT is to use it as an editor instead of a writer. Dump all your thoughts onto the page, then ask it to organize the ideas into a better flow. Point out places where it’s repeating, and notice places where the argument doesn't quite make sense. Those are jobs AI is exceptionally good at because the thinking has already been done.

The goal here is to let AI handle the parts that are slow, repetitive, or difficult so you can spend more time on the parts that only you can do. That's a much better partnership, and in my experience, it produces writing that still sounds like a real person wrote it.

4. Using AI to build your website

AI website builders are becoming increasingly popular. Type in what your business does, answer a few questions, and voilà—you've got yourself a website.

And look, websites aren't actually that hard to build anymore. « I’m a web designer and I agree with that message.

There are AI builders. Drag-and-drop platforms. Beautiful templates created by actual web designers. You do not need to know how to code to get a perfectly functional website online.

The hard part is knowing what needs to go on it, where it needs to go—and why.

A good web designer is thinking about buying psychology. Messaging. The order someone needs to receive information. Where they're likely to hesitate. What they need to understand before they're ready to click. How someone moves from “Who is this?”to “This is exactly what I need.”

And you have information about your customers that AI doesn't automatically have.

You know:

👉🏼 What your clients need to understand before they're comfortable hiring you.
👉🏼 What they're skeptical about because you've heard the same objection on 20 discovery calls.
👉🏼 What they think they need versus what they actually need. [BROCCOLI/CHOCOLATE opportunity here.]
👉🏼 Why your best clients choose you instead of another perfectly capable business.
👉🏼 Which past projects prove you can deliver what you're promising.
👉🏼 What working with you actually looks like from inquiry to finished project.

Your website has to take all of that information and put it in the right order. Someone lands on the site. They recognize themselves. They understand what you do. They see why you're different. They understand the offer. Their biggest questions and objections get answered. They see proof that you can do what you say you can do. And when they’re ready, the site makes the next step obvious and easy.

Ask AI to build a website without those inputs and, sure, you'll get a website. That doesn't mean you'll get the right website for your business. You'll probably get a hero section. An About section. Three little service boxes. Some testimonials. A call to action. Maybe a nice gradient if the robot is feeling spicy.

If you're determined to use AI to build yours, ok. But please, please give it a strong foundation to start with.

Know your brand. Know your offers. Know your customer. Know the objections. Know what makes you worth choosing. Know which work you need to showcase and why. Have a strong enough voice that you can tell when AI has wandered into Generic Internet Business Land.

And frankly, there are plenty of beautifully designed website templates created by real designers who have already thought through hierarchy, layout, usability, and the flow of information. You don't necessarily need AI to reinvent the wheel just because it can.

And for the love—please don't let it generate all your graphics, too. Nothing says “I took every available shortcut” quite like six glossy, vaguely human people with seven fingers selling your very real, very human business.

5. Edit for personality.

Write like you talk. Edit like a stranger. Most people think the final step is editing AI to sound less like AI. I don't think that's quite right. The final step is editing until it sounds like you.

Imagine you're sitting across from your favorite client over coffee. Would you actually explain it this way? Would you use these words? Would you tell this story? If not, keep editing. Your readers don't know what prompt you used, but they do know when something feels strangely impersonal.

One exercise I love is reading the entire piece out loud. You'll immediately hear the places where the writing feels stiff, repetitive, or like you're trying too hard to sound smart. Those are usually the sentences that need the most attention.

Here are a few patterns I notice over and over again. Feel free to use copy this list in your prompts as what not to do:

"Not because ___, because ___." ***
"Here's the thing..."
"The truth is..."
"Honestly?" (unless you're literally being honest after hiding something 😂)
"The reality is..."
"It isn't X. It's Y." ***
Three short "punch" sentences in a row. The one-liners. Dead giveaway.
The same point repeated three different ways.
False drama.
Overusing em dashes.
Lines that don’t make sense if you really look close. (please just edit ruthlessly - I’ve seen this everywhere from royals to local reporters.)

Yes, remove the obvious AI patterns, unless some are genuinely how you talk. I, for one, will never stop using em dashes or saying ‘here’s the thing’. I was doing that long before AI showed up, and I’m not changing how I write.

The goal is for people to walk away feeling like you were in their head, reading their thoughts—not immediately think ‘oh this is AI’, dismiss the point and close the laptop.

Putting it all together

AI can help you write the copy, organize the ideas, generate options, and even build the website. But underneath all of that still has to be a business that knows who it’s for, what it sells, why someone should choose it, what customers need to hear, and what should happen when they’re ready to buy.

And before you spend money sending more people toward that business, it’s worth making sure those pieces are actually in place.

Want some help finding your voice and get back to the branding basics?

If you’re nodding along thinking, “Wait… this is exactly what I need,”—you’re right. And I’ve got tools to help you actually do the work.

Free thing to help 👉🏼 the Website Prep Workbook—it walks you through the foundational questions you need to answer before you design anything. And then it goes deeper into everything that goes into building a website, including how much it will cost.
Paid thing to help 👉🏼 The Brand Kit is my plug-and-play resource to walk you through all five steps in this post. Inside, you’ll find:

Curated font pairings (Canva + Squarespace ready)
Dreamy, done-for-you color palettes
Logo templates you can edit in Canva
A build-your-own Brand Style Guidebook template (this alone is worth more than the cost of admission!)

👉🏼 Grab the Website Prep Workbook for free →
👉🏼 Or check out The Brand Kit here →

Whether you’re building your first website or finally tired of the DIY patchwork, these resources will help you look polished, feel clear, and show up confidently.

✨ Want some font pairing ideas^^? I have twenty. Grab my favorite Squarespace x Canva font pairings here and I’ll send them to your inbox.

(Or shop my full website templates—they include the complete Brand Guide with font + color palettes, SEO prompts, and more!

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* Resources I might have mentioned

Start a free trial with my preferred email marketing platform, Kit
get 20% off your first payment with Dubsado after the free trial
Free Canva Pro credits when you sign up for a free account to make your promo materials
Get your legal stuff in place with affordable and customizable legal templates through the Boutique Lawyer