8 Apr 2026 · 5 min
Steve Lichtman explains how to use AI without sounding generic: tell it who you are, who you help, and how you speak, then feed it samples of your actual work. AI becomes a speed tool that drafts in your voice, not a replacement for it.
All right guys, episode 38 here, and I wanna go a little deeper on the AI conversation today. I'm gonna do that too. So there's gonna be way more AI content because I'm diving 2 feet deep like a lunatic for a while now. You know, I'm, I'm deeper than I've ever told anybody with it or ever admitted to it. Even when I was anti it, because I wasn't anti AI, I was anti the way people were presenting their, their AI solutions, the way people were presenting their, oh, look at me on ChatGPT. I had it make 3 social media post for me, you know, and they put no content in there or context. That's why I always was shitting on it for years because the people that are stupid were just, the lazy people were just making a mess out of it. But my number one concern I hear when I bring this up is, but I don't wanna sound like a robot with AI. And look, that's a totally valid and completely fair concern because we've all seen AI content out there that reads like it was written by someone who's never in their lifetime had a human conversation. Like they lived literally in a bunker, like they're in the, the TV show Fallout and they, they just came outta their freaking bunker. You know, it's buzzword soup, fake enthusiasm, em dashes everywhere. The posts that start with things like, in today's fast-paced world, we all have heard and seen this bullshit up and down our LinkedIn feeds and on our social media feeds everywhere. And that stuff is everywhere and it's killing the feed. But here's what I want you to understand. That's not what AI has to produce at all. That's what lazy-ass prompting produces. That's when you, when you use AI without giving it any context, without telling it who you are and without feeding it your actual ideas. Hell, of course it's gonna sound generic and sound like crap. It doesn't know you. And the fix is simple, but most people skip it. You have to give AI your voice first. Right? That's what building a digital twin's all about. Here's how. Before you ask AI to write anything for you, I want you to tell it 3 things. I want you to tell it who you are, who you help, and I want you to tell it how you naturally talk. Casual, direct, no jargon, maybe a little rough around the edges. And then lastly, I want you to give it a sample of stuff you've already written or said that sounds like you. So give it some podcasts that you're on, give it some content that you've written. Give it your book. Give it something to actually work off of. Then when you ask it to draft something, it's working from your material in your voice. You still gotta clean it up. You still have to add specific stories, real moments, but now you're editing a draft that's at like 70, 80% instead of staring at a blank page. And look, the goal's never to let AI replace your voice. It can't, can never fully replace you no matter how hard people try. I don't, I don't, I'm not into that. The goal here is to stop letting the blank page silence you. It's taking ideas outta your head and putting them onto paper and turning it into something that can make it happen for you to get your, your, your words out to the world so you're not in the darkness, you're not in the shadows, you're not silent anymore. So what I want you to do is try this today. Open up whatever AI tool you use. I could care less. Paste a paragraph of something you've written before and say, write in this style. See what it gives you. You'll realize that it's gonna give you something better than maybe you've gotten in the past. And now you adjust it from there. And it only takes one session to start pushing it in the correct direction and getting it right. You make a separate project, upload the files to that project from your other things that you got going on. And just start really working AI into a system that is an extension of you and a, and a beneficiary to the work that you've done in the past that helps you create faster work for yourself in the future. It's how you scale yourself. It's really easy once you start putting the work in, and it's not a lot. So the riff of the episode today is gonna be this: AI doesn't steal your voice. Lazy prompting does. So give it something real to work with. Right? Artificial intelligence. It's artificial intelligence. Why do we keep forgetting that? We're still the part that's not artificial. We're the human part. We still have to add the human voice to it. We're always gonna have to add human voice to it, no matter how good it writes as us. It's never gonna know every story in your head. And that's what you have to start bringing out, or at least start recording them all and then putting all those stories into your AI system. Then you might get closer to something, but man. I can't even fathom having to talk that long. So look, I'm Steve Lichtman. It's Unfiltered and Unshakeable. Thank you so much, and I will see you in the next episode.
