AI writing tools are good at structure and terrible at judgement. Here is a way to use them that does not flatten how you sound.
Writers fall into two camps on AI drafting tools: refuse entirely, or paste the output and publish it. Both are a mistake. The tools are genuinely good at one narrow job and genuinely bad at the one that matters.
What they are good at
- Turning a messy pile of notes into an outline
- Suggesting sections you forgot
- Rewriting a sentence you have stared at for ten minutes
- Catching the places where you explained something twice
What they are bad at
- Knowing which of your examples is the interesting one
- Having an opinion worth disagreeing with
- Getting specifics right — numbers, names, what actually happened
- Sounding like you
A workflow that keeps your voice
- Write your notes first, badly. Everything you know about the subject, unstructured. This is the part that has to be yours.
- Ask for an outline, not prose. Give it your notes and ask what order the sections should go in and what is missing.
- Write the prose yourself. This is the step people skip, and it is the step that decides whether the article sounds like a person.
- Ask for a critique, not a rewrite. "Which paragraph is weakest and why" gets you something useful. "Rewrite this" gets you something bland.
- Check every fact. Confident wrong answers are the failure mode. If you cannot verify it, cut it.
Say so when it matters
If a tool wrote substantial parts of a piece published under your name, say so. Readers are not annoyed by the tool; they are annoyed at being misled about who is talking to them.
Use it for the scaffolding. Do the building yourself.
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