How to fight AI prose in your writing

Recognition of AI writing is widening from heavy AI users. It is in everyday business communication, which is why this conversation keeps coming up. My recent post, the Synthetic Language Curve (May 28th), named where the trend is going. Here is the system I built to counter it.

You need rules about how you sound, plus a list of phrasing and words to avoid. You also need a way to reinforce both and improve them over time. I am using my own filenames and terminology. Change them to suit your setup. Here are the steps.

1. Gather documents, emails, posts, whatever you had that was written before AI.
2. Have your agent of choice analyze this and create a voice-guide.md.
3. Create a list of phrasing, words, and cadence that sounds like AI to you. Have your agent add rules to avoid them in the voice-guide.md.
4. Create a command prompt that analyzes an ideation session and compares what AI proposed against what you took as the final output. I call this prompt /mine-voice (I wrote about it on April 2nd).

Optional:

5. If you use AI across different contexts like work and social media, you may want different rules for each. A strict professional tone is not the same as a conversational tone with friends. Create a content-guidelines.md to capture rules that are specific to each context.

Before I ask for help with any content output, I run the command /load-voice. This loads my voice-guide.md and content-guidelines.md into context, so how AI helps me is defined, including its suggestions on grammar. When I am done with the session I run /mine-voice. It adds rules organically by analyzing what I took as suggestions vs. what I did not.

Will this catch all the AI in your output? No. The catch rate builds with each /mine-voice session. Will this help how your content performs? No. If it was boring before, it will be boring in your voice. When model versions change, will you have to be more vigilant? Absolutely. It may even regress.

Worth a mention, I was scrolling through Claude plugins and noticed under marketing there is a brand voice. I am calling this out since there may be solutions that do not require rolling your own.