AI should be your ghostwriter, not your brain.
That is the simplest way I can explain where most businesses are going wrong with AI-generated content.
They outsource the idea, the writing, the tone, and essentially everything else to the tool. Then they wonder why the finished piece sounds like every other article, email, and LinkedIn post online.
Here’s the thing.
AI is producing an average of what it has already consumed. If you ask it to decide what you think, you will get an average of what everyone else has already said.
Your advantage is not access to the tool. Everyone has access to the tool.
Your advantage is your specific expertise, your judgment, your conversations, and the point of view you earned by doing the work.
Look at how journalists use it
Newsrooms are a useful example of the distinction.
The Washington Post’s published standards say its reporters retain primary responsibility for reporting, writing, and fact-checking their stories. The Post also says journalists and technologists remain involved in vetting, editing, and contextualizing AI products and experiences.
One of its opinion writers described using ChatGPT as a supplementary fact-checker and a tool to suggest clarifications and cuts before the work reaches a human editor.
That is AI assisting the work. It is not AI becoming the journalist.
The writer still needs the angle. The journalist still reaches out to knowledgeable people. The expert still supplies the judgment and quote that make the story more than a summary of existing summaries.
There is an entire service built around that need. Help a Reporter Out, better known as HARO, connects reporters with credible sources who can provide insights, quotes, and interviews. It briefly disappeared, was acquired and revived, and is now free for both journalists and sources.
Think about what that tells us.
Journalists have better research tools than ever. They can ask AI to summarize a subject in seconds. They still need a real person who knows something, believes something, and is willing to attach their name to it.
People use AI without fully trusting it
A new Gallup survey, reported by the Associated Press, found that about one in five Americans who sought financial advice during the previous year used AI. Yet only about three in ten U.S. adults had at least some confidence in AI’s money-management expertise. About eight in ten had at least some confidence in financial advisers.
This was a U.S. financial-advice survey, not research about every professional service. So I would not pretend the exact percentages automatically transfer to lawyers, accountants, or consultants.
But the tension is familiar: people will use AI to begin understanding a high-stakes problem while still looking for a human who can understand their situation and stand behind the advice.
Even Google is making authorship more explicit. In an August 6 documentation update, Google added author.url as a recommended property for article structured data, a link to a page that uniquely identifies the person behind the article.
That is not proof that adding an author page will suddenly make you rank. Google does not guarantee that structured data will produce a particular search appearance.
My inference is simpler: when generic information is cheap, clearly connecting useful information to a recognizable expert becomes more important, not less.
Use AI on the back end
The fact that you have access to AI should remove work from the back end of the process, not the front end.
The front end is where the value lives:
- The question a client asked yesterday
- The objection your sales team keeps hearing
- The problem your staff just helped solve
- The opinion you have after seeing the same mistake for ten years
- The detail that changes the obvious answer into the honest one
That is your goldmine.
Once you supply the raw material, AI can help make the idea clearer and more concise. It can suggest an analogy. It can show you how to explain the same point to someone who does not share your technical vocabulary.
We are not all wordsmiths. Some people are simply very good at what they do and have one or two ways they have always explained it. AI can help translate that expertise for a different audience without pretending to be the source of it.
The workflow is the modern version of working with a ghostwriter.
You do not call a ghostwriter and say, “Invent my experience, opinions, and point of view. Let me know what I believe when you are finished.”
You brief them. You talk through the idea. You give them the stories, judgment, and rough language. Their job is to shape what is yours into something other people can understand.
“I don’t have time to supply the ideas”
Fair question.
Then do not write a first draft.
Record a voice note.
Brain-dump everything you think about one real question. Explain it the same way you would explain it to a customer sitting across from you. Let it be repetitive. Let it be rough. Give the AI something human to work with before asking it to organize the answer.
When the draft comes back, read it aloud.
Not silently. Out loud.
Does it sound like something you would actually say? Would those words come out of your mouth in a conversation with a client?
There is no perfect checklist for that. Taste is the measure of success.
If it sounds polished but foreign, the tool improved the grammar and erased the person. Put the texture back.
Try this once
Open the voice-notes app on your phone.
Answer the most recent question a customer asked you, or explain the most recent problem you solved for one. Then give that recording to AI and ask it to organize the answer without changing your opinion or inventing details.
Read the result aloud and fix anything you would never say.
That is the job of AI in your content: not to replace the human idea, but to help the human idea travel further.
If this changed how you think about using AI, hit reply and tell me what you were doing before, and what you will try differently now.
Sources
- Associated Press: Some U.S. adults are using AI for financial guidance, but few trust it: Gallup/Edward Jones survey results and methodology
- The Washington Post: Policies and Standards: reporters’ responsibility for reporting, writing, and fact-checking; human involvement in AI products
- The Washington Post: How journalists can use AI ethically: a columnist’s described uses for supplementary checking, clarification, and editing
- HARO: How the journalist-source service works: reporters submit source requests and receive expert insights, quotes, and interview leads
- HARO: About Help a Reporter Out: current ownership, operating model, and free access
- Google Search Central documentation updates: August 6 addition of
author.urlas a recommended Article structured-data property - Google Search Central: Article structured data: author identification guidance and limitations of structured data
