How to Use AI Without Losing Your Voice

I’m on social media a lot. I’m on it every day because of the work I do for our clients. Because of that, I’ve started noticing something: I can usually recognize an AI-generated image, and now I often scroll right past it.

I’m beginning to do the same thing with the writing. I can recognize some of the patterns AI uses, especially when someone has copied and pasted the content without changing it. And research is telling us I’m not the only one noticing.

That is one of the reasons I believe we have to make sure we are still showing up as humans.

I’m not against AI. I use it all the time. I just like to think of it as a virtual assistant, not the human behind the business.

AI can give us an outline. It can help with grammar. It can organize our thoughts, research a topic or help us see what we may have missed. I can even put an article into AI and ask, “What else should I be thinking about?”

But I don’t want it replacing my voice.

One of the ways I do this is to give ai my topic, a few thoughts about the topic and then ask ai to write a starting article for me adding the research to back my hypothesis. And yes that is me writing that word not ai. After it gives me a draft - I turn on the dictation and read it back to my ai adding my stories, my voice to the article.

Does that make sense to you?

Sprout Social’s 2026 research found that consumers ranked human-generated content as the top content priority they want from brands. I want to hear their stories. I want to know what they think. And I want people reading my content to hear my story too.

That is the part AI cannot supply for us.

Before I publish anything, I ask myself, “Would I actually say this? Does this truly sound like me?” If the answer is no, I change it.

I add my own story. I add examples from workshops and trainings. I add questions clients have asked me. Those are the things that make the content mine.

AI can help us get the words on the page. But before we publish them, we still need to make sure the person reading those words can hear us in them.