Why Your AI Content Sounds Generic

These days, AI has become like a co-pilot. I use it every day in my work. Specifically, I am using Claude.

Heck, I even have a project set up as a health coach now. 🤪 It’s all set up to help me track my food, my macros, my exercises… and keep me locked in on a weight loss target. Honestly, it’s been helpful so far.

In this issue, I want to dive a little deeper into having AI create content. Obviously, anybody who has been in the content game as long as I have is going to find this one particularly interesting. 😜

Thing is, there’s a lot of AI slop around. You can tell it is AI from a mile away. And it cheapens it substantially.

So, does that mean you don’t use it at all?

Not necessarily. It means you use it as an assistance tool, but not a creator tool.

In this issue, I’m going to share exactly how I am personally doing this now. Not because I have it all figured out, of course. This space changes quickly…. but this is where I am now.

Also, I’ve got a new tool to tell you about. 😎

So, let’s do this…

Why Your AI Content Sounds Generic

So I’ve been pretty open about using AI more in my content process lately. Not just dabbling… but actually building it into my regular workflow and talking about it publicly as I figure it out.

It has been a MASSIVE boost to my ongoing content audit on the BMA site – and I’m even beginning to see the traffic increases from it. I’ll tell you more about that later. 😎

As somebody who has been producing content for YEARS myself (and consider myself a pretty good writer as well), using AI-assistance has been a process.

Too useful for me to ignore… but at the same time I’m very leery about that invisible line where it starts to feel…. like it isn’t me.

The reason I bring it up is because I think a lot of people are quietly wrestling with the same thing right now. You want the speed and efficiency that comes with AI-assisted writing. But you don’t want your content to turn into the same generic mush that’s flooding every inbox and feed out there.

I know from experience with clients that content production, copy, and writing email sequences can be a block for many people. I know how much AI can help…. but nobody wants to sound generic.

So where’s all that mush actually coming from? Because I don’t think it’s coming from the AI.

The Problem Is What Goes In

Scroll LinkedIn for a few minutes. You know what I’m talking about. The same hollow energy. The same sentence structures. Content that reads like it was produced by nobody in particular, for nobody in particular. AI has almost ruined LinkedIn, honestly.

Most people blame the tool. I don’t.

What’s actually producing all of that is people typing one vague sentence into a chat window and pasting whatever falls out. “Write me a blog post about email marketing.” “Give me 5 tips for my WordPress site.” No actual perspective. No specific experience. No real reason this piece should exist instead of the ten thousand other pieces covering the same ground.

It is actually pure laziness is what it is! These people are just trying to check boxes. But, they don’t care a bit about what the content actually is.

In the lack of any good input, AI will try to fill the void. It gives you the statistical average of what that content looks like — the phrases that show up most often, the safest take, the structure that gets used everywhere.

You asked for average. Average is what you got.

The AI didn’t fail you. You just didn’t give it anything real to work with.

I’ve seen a lot of AI content that’s about as deep as a mud puddle. Hypey promises, zero substance. You can tell immediately the person who wrote it never actually did the thing they’re writing about. They just prompted their way to something that looked like content and called it done.

That’s not a tool problem. That’s a thinking problem.

What I Actually Do

I don’t have some big secret here. But, I realize that I don’t want AI to GENERATE content for me. I want it to ASSIST me. I’m the creator. I’m the driver. And that’s an important mindset here.

Before Claude writes anything, I go first.

I pull up Wispr Flow (a voice dictation tool I’ve been testing lately — and it’s working really well) and I just talk. My actual take on the topic. The angle I want to hit. Something from my own experience that connects to it. Whatever’s in my head at the time. I’m not trying to be articulate or organized about it. I’m just getting my own thinking into the session before the AI touches a single word.

I also have Claude set up (through instructions I’ve given it) to be able to ask questions back. To ask for personal stories that tie into the topic. To help extract things out of me unique to the piece.

That raw material is what the draft gets built from. My perspective, my angles, my observations — not the AI’s best guess at what a generic article on the topic would look like.

And then — this part is just as important — I don’t accept what comes back as-is. I go through it manually and edit. A lot. I re-write entire sections sometimes. I add some inside humor. Maybe an emoji here and there. 🤪

The AI gets me a strong working draft fast. I turn it into something that sounds like me.

Those 3 things together — speaking my thinking in first, having it quiz me back, then editing heavily on the way out — are what make the difference.

Teach the AI to Sound Like You

Here’s the next level of this — and honestly, it’s something I’ve been working on myself lately.

Beyond just feeding your thinking in before each session, you can actually train your AI on your voice directly. Give it enough examples of your real writing — stuff you wrote yourself, before AI was in the picture — that it starts to understand the patterns that make your content sound like you specifically.

Not just your topic. Your rhythm. Your sentence length. The way you open a piece. The transitions you reach for naturally. The words you’d never use. The humor style. How formal or casual you actually are versus how formal you think you are. (Those two things are often pretty different, by the way.)

For instance, my AI knows I write very casually. It knows I like short punchy sentences. If I start sounding like a college term paper, you’d know I didn’t write that. 😂

The way to do this is through a voice profile — a document you drop into your AI tool of choice. Once it’s in there, every draft starts from your voice instead of working its way toward it. Big difference.

I’ll go deeper on this in the second article this week — including a tool I’ve been putting together specifically for this. Worth reading if this resonates.

Anyway…

The slop isn’t coming from the robot. It’s coming from people who skipped the thinking — and who never bothered to tell the AI who they actually are.

Think about photography for a second. The camera doesn’t make the photographer. The seeing does. All the judgment about what to shoot, when, and why happens before the shutter clicks. AI works the same way. The model generates. You do the seeing.

So get your perspective in before you prompt. Edit what comes back like you mean it. And take the time to actually teach your AI your voice.

Do those three things and your content will sound a lot more like you. And a lot less like everyone else’s. 😄

WordPress News & Updates

Judge orders Mullenweg to explain missing messages. The WP Engine vs. Automattic lawsuit keeps rolling. A federal magistrate judge has ordered Matt Mullenweg to provide a sworn declaration explaining why he’s produced almost no WhatsApp, Signal, or Telegram messages in discovery — just 40 Telegram messages, one Signal message, and zero WhatsApp messages. The judge called the allegations of deleted evidence “concerning.” Full story at The Repository

GoDaddy transferred a 27-year-old domain to a stranger — with zero documentation. A GoDaddy support agent accidentally transferred a nonprofit’s domain to a complete stranger in four minutes, bypassing two-factor authentication and domain lock. The org spent four days and 32 phone calls trying to get it back — GoDaddy closed the case saying “matter resolved.” The domain only came back because the woman who received it figured out something was wrong and called them herself. A stark reminder about where your domain lives. Full writeup at Anchor Host

80+ WPFactory plugins temporarily closed after suspected backdoor. A user reported a suspected backdoor in the premium version of WPFactory’s EU/UK VAT for WooCommerce plugin, leading WordPress.org to temporarily close all 80+ of WPFactory’s plugins — covering 170,000+ active installs. This is the fourth plugin backdoor disclosed in a month. The pattern of trusted plugins being compromised after ownership changes is becoming a serious issue worth watching. More details at WP News

WooCommerce ships Subscriptions Health Check tool. After a developer publicly disclosed four bugs that broke automatic renewals for some stores, Woo followed through and shipped a diagnostic tool that lets store owners scan for subscriptions that should be auto-renewing but aren’t. If you run WooCommerce Subscriptions, worth running this. Details at The Repository

FluentCommunity 2.4 ships bulk member import, group messaging, smarter sidebar. If you’re running FluentCommunity, a solid update this week. Bulk member import, group messaging, and a redesigned sidebar are the headliners. See what’s new in FluentCommunity 2.4

Ollie adds full WooCommerce support. The block-based Ollie theme has launched WooCommerce support, including a full suite of store templates, 36 dedicated WooCommerce patterns, a setup wizard that handles store configuration automatically, and product collection blocks with carousel support — all built natively in the block editor. Ollie Pro starts at $89/year. Full details at Ollie

FluentCart 1.3.23 & 1.3.25 — incremental fixes. Two quick polish releases from the FluentCart team this week — shipping math fixes, license activation improvements, VAT on PDF receipts, and one-click addon installs among the highlights. Nothing earth-shattering, but good to see the steady cadence of fixes. Personally, I can’t wait to migrate to FluentCart myself… I’m just sitting here waiting on the WooCommerce Subscriptions migration tool before I can make the jump. Full changelog at FluentCart

WordPress 7.0 releases May 20. WordPress 7.0 has a confirmed release date of May 20, with a beta on May 14. Worth keeping an eye on — as always, hold off on updating client sites until the dust settles post-launch. More at The Repository

How To Train Your AI To Write Like You

So now that we’ve established why AI content goes generic… let’s talk about what you actually do about it.

Building a voice profile is definitely a useful tool to make your AI work better for you. It is basically an instruction manual for your AI to enable it to more closely approximate your own style of writing. In the end, AI is a big pattern recognition engine. So, we’re going to specifically tell it our own patterns.

The Basic Version

The simplest approach: grab five or so pieces of your best writing — stuff you wrote yourself, before AI was part of your workflow — paste them into Claude or ChatGPT and ask it to analyze how you write.

It’ll do a reasonable job. It’ll pick up on sentence length, your general tone, whether you’re formal or casual. Good starting point.

But “reasonable” isn’t the same as “actually useful.” Left to its own devices, the AI will surface surface-level stuff and miss the things that actually make your writing distinctly yours. So you want to be more deliberate about what you ask it to look for.

What To Actually Tell It To Look For

When you ask the AI to analyze your writing, be specific. Tell it to identify:

• Your sentence rhythm — how long are your sentences on average? Do you use fragments intentionally? Where do you punch a single sentence for emphasis?
• Your punctuation habits — do you reach for ellipses or em-dashes? How often do you use parentheticals?
• Your opening and closing moves — how do you typically start a piece? How do you land it? These patterns are usually more consistent than writers realize.
• Your signature phrases — but only the ones that show up repeatedly across multiple pieces. If a phrase only shows up once, leave it out.
• Your distinctive rhetorical moves — this is the one most people miss. These are the specific ways you structure an argument that nobody else does quite the same way. The AI needs to look for these and give them names. My profile identified what it calls my “meta-commentary move” — the habit of stepping outside the topic to think out loud about my own process and decisions. Once that was named, Claude knew to weave it in consistently.
• Your anti-patterns — the phrases that would immediately tell you something wasn’t written by you. Your personal AI tells, not a generic list from the internet.

The Questionnaire Layer

Sample analysis alone has a blind spot: it only captures what you’ve already written. It doesn’t capture your intent, your philosophy, or what you consciously refuse to do.

So alongside the sample analysis, answer a few questions explicitly:

• How do you see your relationship with your reader?
• What’s your natural energy when writing at your best?
• How does humor show up?
• What do you absolutely refuse to write?

And here’s one I find particularly useful: of the three words you’d use to describe your voice, which one is doing the most work? Usually one is a little unusual — it implies something specific and rules something out. “Respectable” instead of “authoritative.” “Useful” instead of “valuable.” Unpack that word and you’ve got the most diagnostic signal in your entire profile.

This Is An Iterative Process

Here’s the expectation I want to set before you go build one of these..

This stuff isn’t set in stone.

It isn’t as if you’re going to create a voice profile, upload it to your AI…. and it will just magically and beautifully make it sound exactly like you. 🤪 It isn’t really possible.

So, you can tweak it. Improve it over time. Even replace it. Try it out, see if it improves the output… and tweak it. It is an iterative process.

The profile is just a markdown file. You can open it and edit it directly. Add a pattern you noticed missing. Remove something that isn’t quite right. Adjust a phrase. Over time it gets more accurate, more specific, more useful. It is a living document…. so you keep making it better.

So I Made a Tool…

I decided to try building a tool that will help generate your voice profile. I just pushed it up to the site this morning – and it will be found inside a new “Tools” section of your account dashboard.

Right now, it is only available to Concierge clients. I may open it up to others later, but I have a reason for this (which I’ll tell you about in a moment).

This tool will ask you a series of questions about your writing. Some of it feels a little introspective. You will also submit writing samples, of course. In the end, it will process all of it and generate a full markdown file of your voice profile which you can then upload to your own AI tool.

Now, here’s what I’m making this available to Concierge clients right now…

I know many clients – and many site owners who aren’t yet clients – can end up with writer’s block. They know they need, for instance, a good welcome sequence. Or copy for a new landing page. Whatever it may be…. and I simply can’t write it for them. So, it can end up being a roadblock.

So, what I’m envisioning here is another way for me to assist my clients. When they generate a voice profile, I will be able to also grab that markdown file, plug it into my own AI system and their client record, and enable ME to generate email sequences, landing pages, etc… complete with full text that actually gets closer to sounding like the client.

I have other tools I’ll probably create in this regard…. for things like customer profile, market definitions, etc. But…

Imagine if I could output a “ready to publish” email welcome sequence for a client who doesn’t yet have one? Downloadable as a JSON file and import right into FluentCRM. Bam! 😎

Anyway, the new voice profile tool can be found in your account tools.