Ep 54. My honest take on using AI in your content as an Introvert

Shall we talk about AI?
Because it’s literally taking over the marketing world, and I haven’t spoken about it on here yet, so I think it’s time.

I’m going to give you my honest take, including the period where I leaned into it way too much, and what I noticed when I did.

If you’re new here, hello, and a very warm welcome to Quiet Confidence with myself, Anita Popat. I’m a marketing strategist for introverts, and yes, today we’re doing the AI episode.

I’m going to start by saying I’m not anti-AI. I definitely use it. It’s got a place in marketing, and I think it can be genuinely useful, but I also think there’s a lot of pressure to use it for everything right now and not enough honest conversation about what happens when you do.

So here’s what happened with me.

A few months ago, I was relying heavily on AI to write my content, and the reason, which makes me laugh now I’m saying it out loud, is that my coach at the time had just built her own AI bot as part of the program I was in, and I just felt like I had to use it.

Like, it would be weird not to because she was talking about it in the program. And so I did, and I kinda went all in. On the surface, I guess it felt efficient and like I was being really savvy with my time, but pretty quickly, I started to notice things.

The first and most obvious thing was that it completely and utterly sucked the fun out of writing.

I love writing, like genuinely. It’s one of my favorite parts of running the business, but I found myself spending more time typing, “Make it sound more like me,” into Claude than I would’ve spent just sitting down and writing the damn thing. (I know I’m not the only one).

So I was going around in circles, re-prompting, tweaking, and by the end of it, it did produce something that was okay, but it wasn’t me…And I knew it, but I posted it anyway

Secondly, and this one’s a bit more uncomfortable to admit, is that I found myself starting to use it for validation. I’d write something, put it into Claude and say, “Is this good? Does it land with my sweet spot client?”

I realise now that every time I did that, I was outsourcing my decision-making to a robot, and that decision should’ve been mine. Then I caught myself and thought, “Hang on a minute. Why do I need AI to tell me that my content’s good enough?” because that’s not really an AI problem, is it?

More often than not they just say, “Yes, you’re amazing,” right? So I realize that that’s actually a confidence problem, and no amount of prompting is gonna fix that.

The third thing was obviously that my content started to sound like everyone else’s. I think AI-generated content has been around long enough now that you can probably spot the patterns pretty quickly.

I think the reason it sounds off is that it’s too polished. It sounds really impressive, but there’s no real energy underneath it. I don’t know what it is, but you can sense the feeling of no personality or, actual point of view because it’s just a massive word salad that sounds nice.

And that’s what started happening to mine. It was blending in.

For someone whose whole thing is to help people sound like themselves, I mean, the irony isn’t lost on me. It felt soulless, like I’d edited myself out of my own content, and I also felt a bit of a cheat, like, what are you doing, Anita? you know this stuff. Just trust yourself.

I’m sharing this because I think it’s a really important conversation for us as introverts, because AI is genuinely tempting when you find constant visibility draining, or if you overthink every post. Something that generates content for you sounds like a relief, right?

But what I hope is coming through is that the things that make your content magnetic as an introvert, like the nuance, the depth, the specific way you see your world, the stories from your client calls, your particular observations, your point of view, can’t replicate that.

That stuff lives in you, not in a prompt.

When you hand the thinking over to AI, you don’t just lose your voice, you lose that energy and the connection that’s infused in your content that’s going to make the right person stop scrolling and think, “Yeah, she really gets it. And that’s where we want to be.

[00:03:33] So how do I use it now?

I do still use it, I just use it very differently. I’m probably only just scratching the surface. I like to use Claude mainly for idea generation and to help me organize my thinking.

So if I’ve got a topic that I wanna talk about, I might use it to help me see it from different angles. or I might give it my podcast notes, and then get it to structure it as a episode that makes sense for me, rather than it being a massive brain dump and then you lot are like, “What the hell is she on about?”

So in terms of structure and the logical thinking things, I think it works really well. But the thinking always comes from me first – they’re my ideas, my perspective, my stories, and then AI will just restructure stuff or give me some ideas.

I guess I think of it a bit like a sounding board, not as a therapist!

If you’re using AI to check whether your content is good enough, like I was, I’m going to gently ask you, what would it mean to just trust yourself? Because the quiet confidence we talk about on this podcast isn’t about having perfect content.

What is perfect content anyway? It’s about believing that what you have to say is worth saying in your words, in your voice, without needing anyone or anything to tell you that it’s okay first. So yeah, AI can do a lot of things, but it can’t give you that self-belief. That comes from inside you.

So to close, my honest take on AI, use it if it helps, but don’t let it replace your thinking or your voice. Because content that sounds like the real life version of you is your biggest advantage. It’s not a nice to have anymore…I’m going to leave you with that.

Keep building your quiet confidence so you can make that loud impact, and I shall see you next time. Speak soon.