How To Use AI Without Sounding Like AI | Communication Skills Podcast

Ultimize. Now, AI can absolutely help you sound smarter. I don't want to kid you, I use AI all the time. But— and this is a big but— only if you use it correctly. Most people use AI like a shortcut machine. They ask one question, copy the answer, paste the answer, done. Boom. And the result usually sounds like a smart high school student trying way too hard To impress a substitute teacher. Everything becomes overwritten, over-explained, over-polished, and oddly, that lowers perceived intelligence because truly intelligent communication usually sounds a lot more natural than that. The smartest way to use AI is as a refinement tool, not a replacement tool. You don't want to replace your brain or outsource your brain. For example, if you ask AI to write a presentation for you, the first draft will usually sound pretty generic. But if you then ask, what sounds fake here? Make this more conversational. Make this shorter. What would a skeptical audience disagree with here? What would Warren Buffett say instead? Replace abstractions with concrete examples. Cut the jargon. Now the process becomes useful. One tool I use that's really effective is just to do a data dump speaking to an AI. I just brainstorm every possible idea I want to put into a speech, a presentation, a talk, a video script, and then I ask the AI to organize it a little better while using my phrases. That's extraordinarily helpful. One of the biggest hidden advantages of AI is that it allows you to pressure test communication quickly. You can test for clarity, simplicity, tone, structure. Are there enough examples in there? What would the objections be? But here's the important part: you still need the actual insight. AI can organize language, but it can't replace lived experience. Observation, good judgment, taste, curiosity, or human awareness. For example, AI might say something like, good leaders communicate effectively. Well, no duh. It's pretty much a useless sentence. A human observation sounds different. A human might say, you can tell insecure leaders because they answer questions nobody asks just to sound smart. That sounds intelligent because it sounds observed. That's the future. The people perceived as smartest won't be the people using AI to generate the most words. It'll be the people using AI to sharpen genuinely useful observations that they came up with in the first place.