51% of US adults who use AI for creative activities use it to help them write. But most people open a chat window, type a vague request, and paste whatever comes back into their newsletter or their post. The output reads like every other piece of AI sludge online. Same rhythm, same neat little summaries, same handful of words the model loves that you would never say out loud. The distance between writing that gets ignored and writing that gets remembered is small, but the clue lies in something you already have. That something is taste.

Frequent AI writers can identify AI-generated writing with remarkable accuracy. And you really think about it, you can too.

You know when a sentence is wrong. You know when an opening is flat and when a line makes you lean in. Years of reading and writing built that instinct. Your job is to teach the machine what you already feel, then let it copy you at speed.

I spent years writing for clients before I sold my agency, and I built Coachvox to capture how experts think and write so their best ideas can scale. The principle is the same whether you train a bot or train a prompt. Show it your standard, then refuse anything below it. Four moves separate you.

Your taste is what makes AI writing good: how to write with AI

Teach the robot what good looks like

Your intuition for strong writing is the most valuable thing you bring to the table. A model can mimic structure, pace, and tone once you show it examples of what you consider excellent. Feed it three of your best pieces and tell it exactly why they work. Short sentences here. A bold claim there. A specific story. Name the pattern so the machine can repeat it.

Once it knows your standard, show it your back catalogue. Have it repurpose content you already published into fresh posts, scripts, and emails. Ask it to push your half-formed ideas further than you took them. You stay the author. The machine becomes the fastest assistant you have ever hired.

Build a ban list and make it strict

Every AI platform has signature words and phrases it slips into your writing. Shift. Landscape. Signal. The tidy little contrast lines that sound clever but say nothing. Left unchecked, they make your work sound ridiculous, and they undo the effort you put into sounding like yourself. Without a specific banned list of phrases, the AI can't help itself.

Keep a running list of every word and phrase you never want to see, and paste it into your prompt before you ask for anything. Steal mine if you want a head start. Add the words you'd never use and the output stops sounding like a committee of robots wrote it. When a draft still uses them, reiterate the ban list and request a clean rewrite.

Write the emotion into the prompt

People decide with emotion and justify with logic afterwards. A model left alone writes to inform, which is why so much AI content comes out correct but forgettable. You fix that by telling it who is reading and how you want them to feel.

Describe your dream client inside the prompt. Their age, their situation, the thing keeping them awake. Then name the feeling you are aiming for. Inspired. Scared. Empowered. Give the whole piece that slant and the words create the emotion. This is the gap between a dull pitch and an email that feels like a message from a friend.

Crank up the personality until it sounds slightly deranged

Safe writing is boring writing, and boring is the factory setting of ChatGPT and Claude. The best writing carries strong beliefs, memorable opinions, and the odd line that makes a reader wonder if you have lost the plot. Don't skip this step.

Push the model past its comfort zone. Ask for the boldest version, then the bolder one. Demand a hot take, a contrarian opinion, a sentence no algorithm would produce on its own. Aim for output so left field that nobody believes a robot made it. Tell it the inner workings of your mind so it's got something good to work with.

Make AI sound like the best version of you: write better with AI

The people who write well with AI bring four things to the screen. Taste, a strict ban list, a clear picture of their reader, and the audacity to sound like themselves with the volume turned all the way up.

Show the machine your standard and it meets you there. Set no standards and you get whatever it feels like creating. Do work that does you justice when you learn this method.

Get my free workshop on how to write with AI.