Too many people are polarized about AI content. They have black and white thinking.
Either you resist the AI overlords who are coming to replace human beings and AI content is all slop, or everything will be solved magically with AI and machine learning.
Neither of those extremes is useful to anyone.
What I’ve learned instead is that there’s a nuanced middle ground that’s immediately useful for founders.
Here’s where you need to start
The biggest opportunity for founders and content creators using AI isn’t about creating more content from scratch.
It’s about repurposing and increasing the amount of distribution you’re capable of from one single session.
Here’s what this looks like in practice.
- You get on your computer and record just a talking head style video.
- Then you use AI tools like Opus to chop that up into video clips for YouTube Shorts, TikTok, Instagram Reels, and LinkedIn.
- Using a GPT or another tool, you take the transcript, extract the audio, get that transcribed automatically, and create a podcast with it.
Then you take the transcription of the text and run it through a GPT or any number of content creation tools and get a blog post out of that transcript.
From a 10 minute interview or talking head style piece of content, you can get:
- A blog post
- A couple of LinkedIn posts
- Some X posts
- A Medium article
- A Substack newsletter
All from taking 20 to 30 minutes of creating one content asset. Then you repurpose it skillfully using the best practices and templates for each distribution platform.
You can even use AI-enabled tools to automate the distribution of that content as well.
Not only is the creation becoming easier, but the distribution and the automation of that distribution is also just easier and more approachable than ever.
Start with who you are not what AI can do
Before you can use any tools, not just AI tools but specifically generative AI tools to create content or to augment your content, you have to have a firm understanding of your unique beliefs, value systems, your verbal identity, and the messaging that you want to put out into the world.
This comes from your unique perspective based on your own lived experience. It doesn’t matter if you’re going to create a piece of content for SEO on the website with a blog post, a solutions page for your product, or a newsletter. If it’s going to be engaging and help somebody move towards conversion or doing business with you, it’s really going to stem from human emotional resonance.
That has to do with storytelling. That has to do with you injecting your unique experiences and unique information gain.
The process starts first there. You need to know who you are and define what you’re about. Then you add an angle that’s unique to you. What’s your contrarian take? What’s a story or a case study that you’ve experienced?
Then you can upload it into a GPT or into Claude. You can have the tools say what about this angle or the hook you used isn’t quite hitting well enough. The AI can research some best practices for you to toy with. You use it as a content sparring partner to sharpen your thinking and really solidify the best way to describe the point or the takeaway of what you’re going to say.
But you’re using your uniqueness, your unique perspective, your experiences as the basis for improvement and then for distribution.
What I learned building content systems
The most important thing I learned from the company, the agency, and from consulting is that the content really has to start with humans. Before you can automate anything, you have to have a really good process dialed in.
Before automating parts of the process with AI, you need to answer these questions:
- How do we come up with really good topics?
- How do we do market research and competitive analysis to understand where we’re going to be able to carve our own niche?
- What kind of subject matter experts do we need to have access to?
- How do we do good research to find sources?
- What does a good content brief look like before the writing process starts?
- How many drafts do we need to go through and layers of QA or editing?
You have to have the steps well-defined of a good process before you can begin to automate it or augment it with AI tools.
You could do all the research in the world, but if it isn’t based on the pain or jobs to be done or the nuances of being able to relate empathetically to your target audience or your customers, then you can have all the automation in the world and it’s still not going to resonate.
It’s really combining best practices with an existing system, automating what you can, augmenting what you can with AI, and making sure that it’s targeted towards the right people from the beginning all the way through to the end.
How to keep your content authentic
The cliche is just make sure that there’s human oversight with the AI generated content or use a humanizer tool.
I think really you should always start with a thesis or a perspective or a transcript from the human being in question. The person who’s lived through the topic they’re experts in.
You use a body of existing knowledge. Them talking, them on video, them from a sales transcript. You add context into the bot and then you architect the AI system or the automation to replicate what a content team would actually do step by step.
This isn’t just prompting ChatGPT to create a good blog post. You have to actually specifically engineer the components, the templates, every check, the QA, each step exactly as you would for a high performing content pipeline.
After the output is done, it needs to be reviewed by somebody who both understands the English language, somebody who can read it out loud, who’s close to your target customer or target audience to verify that it has emotional resonance. Then again by the expert to make sure that it’s technically accurate and engaging and useful.
You’re building in these systems of redundancy that are not removing the essence that a human being had but instead augmenting the tedious steps or the mechanical steps in between.
How customer behavior changed this year
ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Google’s AI Overviews, and now AI Mode are really allowing consumers to start there with basic information and basic definitions. Trying to create content just to be FAQ style or basic definitions is a losing battle.
We don’t have to search through 10 web pages or 40 links to find the information. We can start off learning about a subject with a quick voice search or a prompt to ChatGPT or Google’s AI Overviews and get the answer immediately.
That’s why having taste, your own unique style, something to stand out based on your own lived experience is really where you can meet consumers. Now they’re going to be able to look up the top of funnel information. They’re going to be able to compare vendors directly in the chat with a lot of accuracy.
Your job is to really educate them or to show them that you’ve been in their situation and here’s what you would do or here’s what you did. If you’re selling a product or a service, you need to connect with their problem in this unique way that only you’ve experienced or you have a unique set of experiences.
These tools have changed customer behavior. They don’t really need to search around for information. It’s much more easily available in the same place. They only pull their heads up away from the chat once they need specifics about the brand, when they want to learn more about you, when they want to hear some kind of story that relates to them on a more emotional level beyond just presenting facts and information.
That’s really important to build into your content creation system from the beginning.
One myth that keeps founders stuck
People are polarized. They have black and white thinking about AI content. Either you resist the AI overlords who are coming to replace human beings and AI content is all slop, or you’re on the other extreme where everything will be solved magically with AI and machine learning.
Neither of those extremes is useful to anyone. It’s just not useful for the average founder or business owner.
Instead, you should ask what is this problem that I’m working on and what are the possible solutions. It looks like this AI or generative AI or this AI tool is an excellent solution. It fits my needs, my budget, the resources I have available to me, the time. Here are the areas that I can use to augment my existing process to make my life easier or to make more money or to save money.
There’s a framework and a set of steps for coming up with a solution and then implementing that solution without falling prey to dogma or extreme thinking. Creating AI content systematically that resonates with your target audience, is true to who you are, and is honestly easier to scale production and distribution if you look at it with a strategic lens.
Founders use Meet Sona to easily create authentic content with AI voice interviews
Meet Sona helps founders define what makes them special and turns 10 minute guided interviews into weeks of tasteful LinkedIn, newsletter, and blog content.
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