Did I Write This Post?

AI Disclosures: Did I Write This Post?

Last week I wrote about how you don’t know what AI is capable of unless you ask. I got some really positive feedback on that post, which is always nice to receive.

I also managed to rile up someone who was convinced my team and I were lying. That the post was “AI slop” and that I didn’t write it. They were considering (threatening) ruining my reputation over it. I don’t know what specifically triggered the anger, and hopefully we can all move past it. But I do think it’s a great opportunity to share my writing process and talk about the importance of AI disclosures.

So let’s talk about it.

First, the discourse

There’s a lot of it around the use of AI in writing. A couple of months ago I gave a talk for an organization of writers that focused on the human pushback against AI, how to identify it, and what to do about it. The message wasn’t “don’t use AI.” It was to understand the fear behind using AI with writing.

Recently, Substack released a tool that scans content and scores whether or not it was written by AI. Chris wrote a whole post about this, which you can read here. The bottom line: the Substack tool is not reliable for determining whether or not content was written by AI, especially since most of these detection tools were trained on content written by humans, often without their consent.

Second, the disclosure

AI disclosure is important, and in some places, a requirement. It’s a good best practice to start. And to the person who assumed my content was written by AI (and not me), thank you. I will do a better job of stating my disclosures. Early and often.

Third, the process

It should come as no surprise that I start with the 5P Framework by Trust Insights™ (Purpose, People, Process, Platform, Performance). Usually.

I don’t always have an idea for what to write about that week. Sometimes I ask our Analytics for Marketers community what questions they’re wrestling with. Sometimes I look online, like at Reddit, to see what the discussions are. And sometimes, I use AI. We took a long time to craft our Ideal Customer Profiles (ICPs), synthetic versions of our best-fit customers built from our own data. We have a skill called “ask-the-ICP,” and when I’m stumped, I do just that. Yes, they’re synthetic, and not a true replacement for talking to real customers. But we’re a small company with limited resources, and I don’t always have the luxury of time, so asking our synthetic ICP is a good enough stand-in.

Once I have a topic in mind, I run it through the 5P Framework by Trust Insights™.

Purpose: Why am I writing this in the first place? Is it educational? Is it thought leadership? I like to determine the Purpose of the post instead of just winging it, so it stays focused.

People: Who is this for? This is where the ICP comes in again. We have a few different segments of ideal customers, and not every post can meet the needs of every segment. The old adage “you can’t be everything to everyone” rings true, even in content creation.

Process: How do I write? With my hands. Sometimes. Depending on how far along I am in developing the topic, I create content a few different ways. 1) audio. I learned from Chris that it’s very efficient to record a voice memo and give that to AI to clean up. 2) draft it the old-fashioned way, in a document. Then I give it to AI to clean up. 3) write down a bunch of unconnected thoughts into Cowork and use AI to help me string them together into a coherent story. The bottom line is that it all comes from me and my brain.

Platform: Here’s where the real AI disclosure comes in. I have a few specific tools that I rely on. That I have built. Customized for me.

The first is my writing style skill. This is one of my most important tools. It’s been trained on years of my writing samples, and I’ve started regularly updating it to make sure it evolves as I do. I haven’t done the formal comparison, but I’d say 9 times out of 10 the writing style skill can mimic my writing with minimal edits. This is important to disclose because as AI gets trained deeper and deeper, it will get harder to tell human writing from AI writing. The catch is that the better versions will be wholly trained and maintained by a specific human. In this case, me.

The next tool is the Co-CEO skill. Shocker, that’s me again. It has my writing specifications, but also deeper subject matter expertise. This skill is used to balance out my thinking. It’s me, but without the emotion. It’s a good gut check.

Next, I bring back the ask-the-ICP skill to see if the content I created met the initial Purpose. If not, I try again. I keep running the post through the ICP skill until I feel like I’ve gotten something useful.

Then comes the real editing. I like to use Hemingway for this. It has an AI component, but I’ve never found that part useful.

Lastly, I read the newsletter on camera for our YouTube channel. Zero AI was used. All the stumbles and stutters included.

Performance: How did I do? Once the post goes live in the weekly Inbox Insights newsletter, I have to wait and see. Ann Handley introduced a smart metric: rate of response. Meaning, did you write something engaging enough that someone took the time to respond and let you know? Last week, as mentioned, I got a lot of positive responses. And a negative one. I don’t mind negative feedback. It’s helpful to know when something I created doesn’t land.

The moral of the story

Listen, I don’t have secrets, and the use of AI is something people shouldn’t gatekeep. The more we disclose our usage, the more trust we build with our audience.

So my bottom line is yes, I use AI to support my writing. No, AI doesn’t write for me. That is me, the self-taught typist who uses her thumbs and moves slowly. The writer who cannot spell “definetly” correctly the first time if her life depended on it and is grateful for spellcheck.

We all (should) have resources to help make our writing better. Some people have human editors and copywriters. Some people use synthetic versions of those roles. The important thing is that the writing comes from us, the humans. Our stories, our expertise, our experiences. AI doesn’t have that, even if it’s trained on our writing. The first version of this post was long, rambling, and messy. My writing tools helped me clean it up and make it more coherent. So here’s my disclosure: I wrote this post. I used AI to clean it up and format it. I hope that helps clarify things.

How are you using AI in your writing?

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– Katie Robbert, CEO