OpinionIn the age of AI, your best bet is to be human
Opinion
In the age of AI, your best bet is to be human
"At the end of the day, if you are leaning 100% on AI to write your thought leadership content, you are taking the personal out of your personal brand," writes Yaffa Abadi, founder and CEO of Abadi Brands.
As I scroll through my LinkedIn feed, I follow the AI crumbs, sprinkled before me in plain sight.
They lead me to an AI-generated word salad...which posts radiate with the human touch, which are 100% ChatGPT babies, and which are stitched together clumsily like Frankenstein versions of both: a little off-putting, a little strange.
Want to try it out yourself? Look for the Israeli with not a trace of Hebrew-isms or spelling mistakes. One-too-many emojis. The overuse of the semicolon. A too-cheery call to action. It's not rocket science.
This influx of AI content on platforms like LinkedIn is natural. And while I'm poking fun, looking beyond the 'ick' that AI-generated content gives me, it's actually an exciting trend: A clear indication that professionals in the Startup Nation finally understand the power of personal branding.
It is no longer a revelation that, as a company leader, sharing your thoughts, ideas, and personal anecdotes is often a far more efficient and effective method to get results. Whether it's onboarding new clients, appealing to new investors, or attracting talent: people create relationships with PEOPLE, not logos.
As a company employee, it's no longer rocket science that developing an online identity is a tool, both in terms of the value you are giving your company as a brand ambassador and as a professional individual who wants to develop a distinct persona to set themselves up for future opportunities.
And, as an investor, the penny is slowly dropping that being present in the ecosystem, showcasing your experience, your ideas, and your 'humanness' is a fast track to creating relationships with your audience of founders and LPs even before they walk into the door.
So, while the knowledge that thought leadership reigns supreme has arrived, the execution is lagging... and we have our AI companions to blame. The sneaky little tools that sell content creation like it ain't a thang, leading to a deluge of distasteful robo-posts that are more off-putting than appealing. Worse, AI, by its very nature, lends itself to compounding the problem: a cycle of AI posts receiving AI comments, a string of AI-to-AI conversations that bring nothing to the world but noise.
Now I am by no means saying one should not lean on, nay, use the crap out of AI tools. ChatGPT/ Perplexity/ Bard, all wonderful tools that I personally use like an underpaid intern whose life depends on my approval. Whether it's to scrape data, re-word a sentence, rephrase a metaphor, or re-work a set of interview questions, my AI tools work overtime.
But if you are not using AI right, you are using it very wrong, and it will hurt you - a recent report shows that AI-generated posts have 30% less reach and 55% less engagement. But worse than low engagement is the bad taste it leaves in the mouth of the reader.
The problem is that creating your own content that's authentic, well-written, and appealing to your intended audience is a time-consuming task for anyone and a daunting task for many. And I'm the first to say while it is hugely beneficial, it should probably not be the number one priority for that founder who needs to be spending time prepping his investor deck, nor the employee with a hard deadline and a micromanager.
Luckily, as AI gets smarter so do we, and there are ways to lean on AI to make your personal branding journey easier, yet still have the intended effect of sounding, tasting, and feeling human.
Two main strategies I would encourage my audience:
Lean on AI for everything but the actual creation
Lean on it to brainstorm, lean on it to come up with the stats to back up your arguments, lean on it to generate ideas and outlines. Once you've written a very basic draft that sounds like yourself, lean on it to make it sharper, to make it flow, to replace the overused word with something more unique. And use your brain to make sure that through this editing process, you don't lose your voice.
Work on prompting
There is no end to resources for learning how to prompt your AI tool of choice. The best way to learn is by doing - when you use a prompt that gets superior results, save it as a template. Give your AI prompt some context, and spell out your tone of voice before you press 'done': these small things will make a huge difference.
At the end of the day, if you are leaning 100% on AI to write your thought leadership content, you are taking the personal out of your personal brand. We need to slowly shift from phase 1 of our AI usage: AI for everything, to a more sophisticated and effective phase: AI "infused" content. In the world of personal branding, don’t be swept away by the easy mistress that is AI and lose the authenticity (and power) of LinkedIn thought leadership.
Yaffa Abadi is the founder and CEO of Abadi Brands, a boutique consultancy specializing in personal branding and thought leadership for investors.
