4 · Content and marketing without losing your voice

AI can produce endless marketing copy in seconds. That's exactly the danger: endless, generic, soulless copy is slop, and customers can smell it. Your voice — the specific, human way you talk about what you do — is one of your few real advantages over bigger competitors. Protect it.

Use AI as a drafting partner, not a ghost that replaces you:

Feed it your voice. Give it examples of how you actually write and say "match this tone," instead of accepting the default robotic register.
Draft, then rewrite in your own words. Treat the output as raw clay. If you publish it unedited, you're publishing the average of the internet, not you.
Make it specific. Replace vague AI filler ("we offer best-in-class solutions") with concrete details only you know — real examples, real numbers you've verified, your actual story.
Verify every claim before it goes public. A made-up statistic or a misquoted "study" in your marketing isn't just embarrassing — depending on the claim, it can be illegal (Lesson 8).

The two failure modes to avoid:

Generic slop — content that could belong to any of a thousand businesses. It builds no trust and no brand.
Confident falsehoods — AI-written claims you didn't check. These destroy trust the moment a customer catches one.

A simple rule: if you'd be embarrassed to have customers know AI wrote it and you didn't improve it, don't ship it. Using AI to write faster is fine; using AI to write worse and call it done is not.

Check yourself. Name the two failure modes of AI-generated marketing content, and the one habit (about your writing) that fixes the first one.

Sources

Federal Trade Commission. (2023). Keep your AI claims in check — performance claims in marketing must be truthful and substantiated. https://www.ftc.gov/business-guidance/blog/2023/02/keep-your-ai-claims-check