To avoid generic AI-generated text, use the LLM as a critic rather than a writer. By providing a detailed style guide that you co-created with the AI, its feedback on your drafts becomes highly specific and aligned with your personal goals, audience, and tone.
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AI models are trained to be agreeable, often providing uselessly positive feedback. To get real insights, you must explicitly prompt them to be rigorous and critical. Use phrases like "my standards of excellence are very high and you won't hurt my feelings" to bypass their people-pleasing nature.
Instead of using AI to generate generic text, leverage it as a partner to enhance your unique voice. A powerful technique is to have AI interview you to create a "story log"—a database of your personal anecdotes and experiences. This provides authentic, non-replicable material for future content.
Treat ChatGPT like a human assistant. Instead of manually editing its imperfect outputs, provide direct feedback and corrections within the chat. This trains the AI on your specific preferences, making it progressively more accurate and reducing your future workload.
Instead of accepting an AI's first output, request multiple variations of the content. Then, ask the AI to identify the best option. This forces the model to re-evaluate its own work against the project's goals and target audience, leading to a more refined final product.
AI-generated text often falls back on clichés and recognizable patterns. To combat this, create a master prompt that includes a list of banned words (e.g., "innovative," "excited to") and common LLM phrases. This forces the model to generate more specific, higher-impact, and human-like copy.
When an LLM produces text with the wrong style, re-prompting is often ineffective. A superior technique is to use a tool that allows you to directly edit the model's output. This act of editing creates a perfect, in-context example for the next turn, teaching the LLM your preferred style much more effectively than descriptive instructions.
When a prompt yields poor results, use a meta-prompting technique. Feed the failing prompt back to the AI, describe the incorrect output, specify the desired outcome, and explicitly grant it permission to rewrite, add, or delete. The AI will then debug and improve its own instructions.
Most AI writing tools produce generic content. Spiral was rebuilt to act as a partner. It first interviews the user to understand their thoughts and taste, helping them think more deeply before generating drafts. This collaborative process avoids "slop" and leads to more authentic writing.
Generic AI tools provide generic results. To make an AI agent truly useful, actively customize it by feeding it your personal information, customer data, and writing style. This training transforms it from a simple tool into a powerful, personalized assistant that understands your specific context and needs.
Standard AI models are often overly supportive. To get genuine, valuable feedback, explicitly instruct your AI to act as a critical thought partner. Use prompts like "push back on things" and "feel free to challenge me" to break the AI's default agreeableness and turn it into a true sparring partner.
