Writing with AI used to be such fun. You just gave a prompt, and boom! A ready-made piece of content. Sure, not everybody loved reading the endless contrastive parallelism (“It’s not X, it’s Y”), but you could publish stuff FAST. 

All of a sudden, Linkedin’s adding a “Seems like AI slop” button of shame, Facebook is tagging content it identifies as AI generated, and even Claude – the AI of choice for creative types – is watermarking its text. In fact, as of 2nd August 2026, the EU requires all AI providers serving its market to mark AI-generated content. It also requires business owners to clearly disclose AI usage (something our podcast recently covered). 

There’s an interesting question underpinning all this: If AI is so helpful in getting content written faster, why are we afraid of being exposed for using it?

Here at NSDesign, we’ve never shied away from talking about our experiments with AI. This is an unbelievably powerful technology with millions of potential applications. It would be short-sighted in the extreme to refuse to use it. That said, we’re conscious that when we publish a piece of thought leadership content like this one, our audience is likely to feel shortchanged if we simply outsourced the task to AI. Trust is a real issue when it comes to AI adoption and people’s attitudes to AI-generated content.

For us, it comes down to who’s in control of the content: it’s not enough to have a “human in the loop”. The human has to be in the driving seat the entire time. 

Here are three tips to help you use AI as a writing assistant without sounding like a robot:

1. Start from a position of mistrust

Yes, this sounds negative, but AI is so good at sounding polished and confident, even when the actual words it’s generating are either meaningless or just plain wrong. When you’re reviewing AI-generated text, it’s crucial to put every sentence under the microscope and ask: “Is this sentence moving the piece in the right direction?” If it’s saying something that’s repetitive, overly verbose, or not actually correct, edit it ruthlessly. Same goes for facts, figures and sources: you need to double-check everything. 

2. Prompt within a project

When you prompt your AI, do it within a project not an isolated chat. Think of projects like folders: you might have one for a specific campaign or product line, and another for your blog. You can load up each project with tailored instructions, tone of voice guidelines, detailed context and examples of past work. 

The benefit of prompting within a project is that, over time, it learns from all the content it’s created for you previously, and the feedback you’ve given it, in addition to the information you gave it at the start. Meaning, of course, that your output is much closer to what you’re aiming for, and of a much higher quality than anything you’d get from a generic prompt.  Projects really can be a game-changer for small businesses that create content. When you combine them with ‘skills’, you can produce something that sounds pretty close to your natural way of writing – in a fraction of the time it would take to create the same piece from scratch.

3. Rewrite your first impressions

Think about the first parts of your piece that people see: that’s your headline, your sub-headings, and your opening paragraph. These are the most important parts to edit, because the few seconds that people spend reviewing them determine whether they think you have something original to say in an authentic voice. In other words, if your first sentence starts with “In today’s fast-paced world …”, your reader has already hit the back button or the little ‘x’ at the top.

So treat these three elements as non-negotiable rewrites, every time. Once you’ve got a solid first draft, go back and write the headline, sub-heads and opening paragraph yourself, in your own voice. By all means, use any salient points from your AI draft, but don’t use the AI’s phrasing in these crucial pieces of trust-building text.

Remember: if in doubt, edit it out! Never trust an AI over your own judgement. It’s a helpful assistant, but you’re the boss!

If you’d like to explore AI for your business in more depth, take a look at our upcoming AI training, or just get in touch for an initial chat.