Use AI Without Losing Your Authenticity | Ep. 62

In this episode of the Video Brand Infusion podcast, Meredith addresses the common fear among business owners about losing authenticity and sounding robotic when using AI tools for content creation. She provides a comprehensive guide on training AI to maintain your unique voice, target audience, and understanding of your business offerings. Meredith introduces the 'magical triad' method, which involves creating three essential documents: a 'Write Like Me' guide, a target audience avatar, and a detailed description of your offers. By leveraging these documents, business owners can ensure their AI-generated content remains authentic and aligned with their brand. Meredith also announces the launch of her second YouTube channel, 'Bots Mean Business', focused on AI tutorials and best practices.

▶︎ Bots Mean Business: http://youtube.com/@botsmeanbusiness
▶︎ Write Like Me GPT: https://chatgpt.com/g/g-679cdf07074481919c0c1812cdccc2ac-write-like-metm

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Transcript

Well, my friends, my very last episode of the Video Brand Infusion podcast that I published on my YouTube channel kind of blew up and not huge, it didn't go viral, but I got a lot of really good feedback on it and I gained a lot of new subscribers from it, which is not usual for me. From a single video.

So today I wanna bring up a really common fear that I have and that I see other business owners having when it comes to. Using AI in your business, and particularly with your content, and that is this fear of losing your own authenticity and your voice and coming off as robotic or you know, sort of artificially manufactured in some way.

So if you're new here, welcome. My name is Meredith. This episode is actually part of the Video Brand Infusion podcast. It's a video podcast here on my channel, and you can also get it in your favorite podcast player. And I'm not gonna pretend that I'm surprised that people were interested in my last video where I talked about how I'm growing my business with ai. AI agents and GPTs, because obviously AI is a hot topic, so I wasn't surprised, but I also wasn't totally sure, um, how, like what you all would think about that topic. Because when I go to look for content around ai, like how to do something with AI or prompts for this or that, or custom GPTs or whatever, what I see a lot of are examples. That output just like pure garbage. Do you know what I mean?

Like it, it's almost like there's a lot of people out there that are like, oh, look at this cool thing AI can do. And it's like cool that it could do it. But the actual output of that is not something that I would like. Attached to my name or my personal brand because it looks like crap. It reads like crap.

It sounds robotic. And you know, these days, I don't know about you, but I feel like I can spot a chat, GPT, like a basic chat, GPT output, like a mile away. And I think other. Humans will, if not already, will eventually be able to pick up on things that are just not quite feeling like they're really up to the level of authenticity that people expect from you, the human.

And obviously this is important for your personal brand, for your video brand, for your business, for your content.

and if you have played with chat GPT or Claude or Gemini or any AI tools and thought, this is cool, but it doesn't sound like me, or I would never post that, or I would never say it like that, then this video is for you.

Now I want you to think to yourself what comes to mind when I say you have to train the ai if you're anything like me. Those words made no sense to me. Like even just six months ago, I didn't know what it meant and it sounded. Time consuming and complicated. Like, what do you mean I have to train the ai?

It sounds like I have to train a person. I don't have time for that. I don't have time to learn that, and I don't know what it means, but if you wanna utilize AI to save time in your business and help you, and actually assist you in. The creation of content for your business, either the content you post outside, like on YouTube or social media and even the content inside, then it's imperative that you maintain your voice and your authenticity, right?

I mean, I think we can agree on that

and the way to make that happen is to train the ai. Now, it's not as hard or time consuming or as difficult as it sounds. It's actually really simple, and I'm going to walk you through it.

It's so simple, in fact that it'll all make sense right here in this video. I don't even need to show you my screen or show you examples. Just think of a triangle

And the three points of that triangle are, number one, sound like me, write like me, create content and words and sentences that look like something I would create. So write like me. Number two is. Keep my target audience, target customers in mind with everything that the AI is creating for you.

 And the third point of this triangle to train the AI

to maintain your authenticity 

is the AI needs to have a deep understanding of. What you offer. So if you have courses, programs, membership, digital product, um, a book working one-on-one coaching,

you can make sure that any AI tool that you're using in your business understands. What exactly your offer or offers are, who they are for, what they do for people, even what they cost and the structure, even like the frequently asked questions that you might have on your sales page. 

So regardless of the AI tools that you're using in your business, within your business or to create content for your business, you have this kind of magical triad, if you will, of the tool knows how to write, like you has a deep understanding of who your audience is. Who you're talking to, and it has a deep understanding of how what you're creating actually fits into the growth of your business through your offers.

So number one, let's talk about how to make the AI sound like you and write like you.

I will put a link down in the description to a free custom GPT that you can use called Write Like Me. I think this was created by Michael Hyatt, but I'm not totally sure.

One of the easiest and most impactful things that you can do to make sure that as you use AI tools, they do sound like you is to. Create for yourself and for the ai. A document that you can easily upload or copy and paste that gives whatever AI tool you're using, the exact style, tone, humor, all of the.

Ways of essentially giving it instructions, an instruction manual for how to write like you or how to sound like you.

and this is relatively easy to do with chatGPT, Gemini, Claude, whatever you're using, even with the free versions, all you have to do is open a new chat and tell it. I wanna create a document of instructions for how AI will know. How to write like me and how to sound like me.

So I need you to analyze the following documents for my tone, my personality, delivery, punctuation, emojis, and create a document for me that I can copy and paste anytime I'm using AI to write something for me.

You don't have to have a big fancy prompt or anything, just tell it what you're trying to do, which is to create a document that you can copy and paste into any AI so that AI knows exactly how to write like you and sound like you. Now you're gonna have to upload or copy and paste examples of your own writing Like right now I'm just kind of talking about writing. So this works for if you're gonna repurpose your YouTube videos into LinkedIn posts or threads or Facebook.

but let's just say you script your videos and you. Want the AI to script your videos the way that you script your videos. You would give it examples of what you are going to create with this document.

 And really the more examples you can give it, the better. So once it analyzes all of that, it's going to give you like some type of an output that you can copy and paste. 

and I have a list of tone and style, structure and syntax. I have a couple of notes around the usage of emojis, like, uh, I think sometimes ai, it loves to use emojis, and I love emojis too, don't get me wrong, but. Uh, I, I don't need like the puzzle piece emoji in, in my content because I never use it.

So I tell it like, these are my favorite emojis to use and it's okay to use other emojis, but use everything sparingly only when it makes sense. Plus, since I give it examples of my writing. It knows it's going to learn how, this is how Meredith would use emojis in these different contexts.

 Have a section that says. Meredith iss to include, sprinkle these in for personality. Slight sarcasm or dry humor self-deprecating winds, pop culture nods, snarky optimism, subtle relatability, rants.

I didn't create this document. I mean, I did. I created it. Together with ai, these are things that AI has analyzed in my writing and then put into an easy copy and pastable document that can go into any AI to write like me, 

and by the way.

I also have a line in here, and feel free to throw this into your own documents and your own prompts. No M dashes. Never use M dashes. And I give an example of what an M dash is. Even when grammatically correct, swap them for ellipses. That's the three dots or commas, always no exceptions.

Now, I know that m dashes are perfectly correct grammatical options when you're writing, but I don't use them, so I don't want the AI to spit out something that's supposed to be written by me that uses characters that I would never use, right? We wanna stay authentic to. Who we are and the content that we create.

That's the whole point of this video, right? 

I saved my document to a Google doc. It's in my Google Drive folder. I have a Google Drive folder. called Repository, which is where I keep a lot of this kind of thing. Like I have a folder for my prompt library, my knowledge base.

That's all stuff from inside a video brand academy or even. Content topics. It's all like my knowledge base and also knowledge sources from other experts

that I might use in and there for like internal GPTs. So all of that goes into my repository so I can access my write like meredith document anytime I need it. Regardless of whatever AI tool I happen to be using at the moment, or if I am setting up, mind Pal workflows and agents to create tools for Video Brand Academy, I can put that into the tool as well 

so the next time you are writing an email or writing your threads or repurposing your content, you can upload that document to the language model that you're using. And in the prompt tell it, make sure to reference the write like Me document. 

 and. Test it out. Just try it. Just do it and then try it. if you don't like the output, then tweak your write like me document Open a new chat, upload your write like me document and say, Hey, I'm trying to train my AI to sound like me, to sound authentic to me so that everything I write.

Sounds like something I would write. Here's my write like me instructions, and here's a recent output that I got that I don't like, and then tell it why it sounds too dry. The sentences are too long. It just doesn't sound like me. Ask it. What should I tweak? What should I change? And then update your write like me document.

If you haven't dipped your toe into any AI tools yet, or if you're not using AI yet to actually help you in your business or help you create content in your business, this is probably the first thing that you should do.

So if you make this the first thing that you do with everything you're doing with ai, then you have a much better chance that the output of the AI that you're using to help you in your business and help you create your content is going to sound authentically like you because it was trained on you to write like you and sound like you.

Now one of the things that I notice that I have a hard time with when I'm using. Uh, AI tools where there is no way to train it on my voice or on anything else. Like, for example, when I'm using Vid iq, which is a common like keyword research tool that has a bunch of AI stuff, uh, built into it. Also the backend of YouTube.

In your YouTube studio, there's a bunch of like AI generated. Content ideas and suggestions and those kinds of things to me sound like ai. They, they sound like I would never create a video with that title. I would never create a video that sounded like that. I don't think this is what my audience is really into.

And this brings up my second point of maintaining your authenticity when you're creating content with AI is. Not only can you train the AI that you're using to sound like you, but you can train the AI that you're using to think of your target audience, your target clients, customers, students, et cetera.

Keep those people in mind for everything that it's generating for you,

So just like with my write like me document, I have a, uh, target audience avatar document and an ideal client profile document. There's overlap between the two, but if I want to use. Chat GPT to help me plan my next YouTube video. For example, not only do I want it to write like me, I want it to know, deeply know, and understand who my audience is and who I am trying to reach with my content.

So you can do the same or similar process like with the write like me process and. Open your favorite AI tool and say, Hey, I'm trying to create my target audience avatar for my YouTube channel. I like to say, What do you need to know? And let the AI kind of guide you? But here are some of the kind of headlines of my target audience avatar document.

we have the core identity, which just kind of describes who they are, where they're at. Um, we have the stages of journeys of your possible audience avatar or your target customer avatar.

You can throw demographics in their age, gender, occupation, location, income

 I Have goals that I know that my target audience has in their business or for their YouTube channel and challenges that they run into 

I have a list of kind of my like umbrella topics as I call them, kind of like the overarching topics for my channel.

And when you have one document with all of this information, all you have to do is again, either upload the document to the AI when you are planning your YouTube content or copy and paste it That way. The language model isn't just pulling from whatever random information that it has from the internet.

It's pulling from that, but it's like, it's giving it this constraint of who are we really talking to here? it gives your language model a complete picture of who we're talking to, who we're trying to reach, so that the ideas that it helps you come up with and perhaps the titles or the thumbnail ideas or the script ideas are in line with your target audience.

 so when you combine, right, like me with. For my target audience, you're helping the AI get really tight and specific, and again, to maintain your authenticity because honestly, if I created content based on the ideas that Vid IQ and even YouTube Studio gave me, it wouldn't be good. 

not only would I lose my authenticity because I'm letting Ai make these big decisions for me, 

but the topics are so generic sounding that like, I don't think anyone would even find them interesting or clickable at all.

Now the last part of this magical authenticity AI training triad is, can you tell that AI has not scripted this video, and it's all just coming straight outta my weird and wacky brain. The third part of this triad is. Training your AI on your offers, and again, just like the other two, writing like me and writing for my audience.

You can use the same process here for training the AI to know what your offers are, 

one really easy thing that you can do and you might even be able to use AI for this, is 

literally copy the text from your sales page. To a document or you might be able to use chat GPT or Gemini for this. Give it a link to your sales page or even a PDF of your sales page and say, Hey, I need this in just like a purely text outline format and 

save that to a document that's gonna have all of the messaging, all of the, you know, testimonials or case studies, all the information about you, all of the details about your offer, the pricing options, the frequently asked questions, everything is gonna be right there, all in one document.

If you only have one offer, there you go. You have your document there. If you have more than one offer, you could combine them all into one document so that with this magical triad, you have this write like me document. You have this target audience avatar or ideal client avatar, and you have your offers.

You have those three things. Yes,

imagine you open chat GPT, and you're like, okay, I need to grow my email list. I need a new lead magnet. I'm looking for ideas for like a cheat sheet or a checklist or some lead magnet that I can promote on my YouTube channel.

give it those three documents and now it has a really clear picture to actually spell out a strategy for you that is going to target the right people and lead them to your offer 

 maybe you're trying to come up with ideas for a whole new offer. Maybe you are trying to come up with ideas for what custom AI tools you should create inside of your membership. What's gonna be useful for people?

When the AI has that magical triad to work with, it's almost like you have this perfect business partner, but you can take it anywhere. You can use Claude, you can use Gemini, you can train this into, custom workflows in mind, pal, Now, I hope that this magical triad of authenticity, um, has been helpful and useful for you. I think these are all really easy. Steps that you can play with, with your AI if you haven't done them already. If you've been using ai, I think you should add this into your mix

and I'm waiting till the very end of this video to mention that I did start a second channel specifically as an outlet for me to talk more about AI and teach more about AI specifically right now, 

Actual tutorials and how tos for, um, mind Pal and creating custom AI tools in my business and your business. The name of that channel is Bots Mean Business, and I've been holding onto that YouTube handle and domain name for like six months now, I'm finally doing something with it. 

it's really new and it's fun, but also a little scary at the same time to be actually. Doing something new on YouTube starting from scratch, starting from zero. So I invite you to join me over on the Bots mean business channel only if you are legitimately interested in.

Learning more about AI in implementing it into your business in an authentic and human way.

I'll put a link to the Bots Mean Business Channel down in the description below this video. I invite you to join me there and probably in the very next, uh, video podcast here on this channel. we'll get back to business of, um, growing on YouTube and growing your business on YouTube and building your binge-worthy video brand.