AI platforms can quickly crank out tremendous volumes of content at amazing rates. Where does all that content originate? There’s not typically a good answer to this question. The challenge in answering the question isn’t dissimilar to the difficulty in parsing out all the learning, experiences, imagination, and everything else that goes into creating a specific piece of human-generated content.
That means it’s dangerous for multiple reasons to publish content that’s straight from AI without some editing or customization.
How do you customize AI-generated content to protect yourself and add value?
Here are 16 go-to ways to customize what AI is producing so that it’s uniquely your content. Depending on your preference, you can choose strategies related to prompt writing, supplying initial input, or adapting output after it’s generated.
Prompt-related Customization
These ideas focus on shaping AI-generated content from the initial prompting stage.
1) Share a request-specific creative brief - Develop a creative brief as a prompt just as you would for any creative project. Communicate the objective, audience, what the content should impact, mandatory elements, and things it should not do, among other information.
2) Query the AI about what helps it succeed – Create a pre-prompt that shares the output you’re seeking and asks the AI what type of information it needs to best deliver unique, high-value output. Use its answer to manage expectations and develop your ultimate prompt.
3) Be your own prompt engineer – Incorporate your personal knowledge of the opportunity or situation to customize a prompt. This leads to valuable content and insights that are shaped from the start by your thinking versus a third-party prompt.
4) Create multiple focused prompts – Take a step-by-step approach to requesting content. Break a complicated prompt request into multiples so that you can see how the content changes from one prompt to the next. This lets you modify the request throughout the process. (BTW, an AI told me that this strategy helped it answer a complex request with greater precision.)
5) Identify your ideas upfront - Before sharing a prompt, identify likely output or answers. Include those ideas within the prompt, asking the AI to weave your ideas into the output it generates.
Shaping Output with Your Input
You can integrate non-AI input into a request to constrain, focus, or expand the content that an AI ultimately generates.
6) Have it work (only) with your input – Share your own initial input (a pre-existing article, report, analysis, etc.). Request that the AI work only with your input as it does its analysis without incorporating outside content sources.
7) Share a unique set of multiple inputs – Feed the AI a series of sources (perhaps sequentially versus all at once), asking it to summarize, synthesize, or extract new ideas into a new, focused piece of content.
8) Develop custom categories to organize the work – Develop your own categories or themes that you want the AI to use to organize content that it develops.
9) Start with a unique data set – Provide online collaboration or survey responses as the sole input. Request that the AI analyze the data and identify insights, themes, or implications. Then, present the AI results to collaboration or survey participants and gather their additional perspectives.
10) Change the size, scope, or version of pre-existing content – Present AI with already-developed content, asking for it to shorten a piece that’s too long, aggregate multiple pieces into a longer-form content asset, or to edit something (asking the AI to only make minor grammar changes).
Adapting AI Output
These suggestions focus on modifying or enhancing AI-generated content after its creation.
11) Edit (all) the AI output – This is the fundamental customization strategy for AI content. Even when it looks like final copy, edit and adapt it to reflect your writing style, voice, expertise, perspectives, and sensibilities.
12) Organize AI output in unique ways – Arrange and group AI-generated content in new ways to yield additional insights. That could include developing categories that communicate meaningful groupings within long lists.
13) Remove lower-value content – Perhaps the AI-generated output is a mixed bag with some content that’s off-target or not insightful. Narrow the AI output so that it’s more succinct and focused.
14) Summarize AI-generated content – Just as you’d ask AI to shorten your content, you can flip the approach. Edit lengthy AI-generated content to make it more digestible.
15) Expand the content with your background – Add to the content with additional knowledge, stories, and expertise that are all yours.
16) Incorporate AI-generated snippets – Place one or more brief AI content assets into your original material to lengthen, expand, and/or deepen your creation.
Customization Is Vital
Customizing AI-generated content involves a mix of technology and human creativity. AI can provide a foundation, but it's your unique personal experiences, insights, and style that make the content meaningful for your brand and audiences. Applying one or more of these sixteen strategies with AI-generated content that’s important ensures that what you are producing is informative, inspiring, engaging, and unmistakably yours. - Mike Brown
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