Lead us not into temptation – don’t let AI dilute your brand’s authentic voice 

There’s a widely-quoted stat that only 2% of people take the stairs when there’s an escalator available. I’m not sure how robust that study was, but it’s fair to say that we homo sapiens aren’t averse to a helping hand or shortcut.

AI has made content writing easy. Like, escalator-level easy. The deluge of material flooding LinkedIn reflects the speed with which a vague thought can now be whipped into a highly-polished post. But em dashes and criminal overuse of superlatives aside, is that a good thing?

On the plus side, it’s given more people the confidence to share content. Now everyone has a grammatically-accurate voice, and a bottomless bounty of inspiration. Can you write a dozen posts to position my amazing new product at the cutting edge of innovation and get customers scrambling to place an order? Absolutely! Want a full set of brand guidelines and a few recommendations for dinner to go with that?

But if you’re taking a slightly less optimistic view, there’s suddenly a hell of a lot more content vying for our already frazzled attention spans. One study suggests AI is enabling marketers to produce 42% more content each month – and as psychologist and economist Herbert A. Simon warned: “A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.”

Volume is only part of the challenge. Equally concerning is quality. While AI can generate vast amounts of content at speed, it draws from the same pot of publicly available training data. The result is a stream of material that often feels generic, repetitive, and insincere.

That could be a problem according to LinkedIn’s 2025 B2B Marketing Benchmark Report which reveals that “trust has become the most valuable outcome in B2B – and the clearest path to ROI.”

So what do we do?

Think critically

After writing the above intro, I was struggling to decide what to write next. And it was Friday afternoon. And the sun was out. And I could see the barbecue on the patio.

So, naturally I asked ChatGPT.

After massaging my fragile ego with a few choice compliments about the fantastic start I’d made, it suggested my next paragraph should explain why differentiation is important in B2B marketing.
Given my prompt had specified B2B marketers as the main audience for the blog, this suggestion concerned me. I explained that reminding these good people that differentiation is important would be like telling Max Verstappen he needs to drive fast to stand a chance of winning his next race.

Chat immediately acknowledged my reservations and came back with much better responses (also suggesting I might want to check with my boss before knocking off early to light up the barbecue).

The point is, writing with AI should be a two-way, iterative process. It’s a mind-bogglingly useful tool that can speed up the writing process and save you from the dreaded blank page. But don’t outsource your ability to think critically. Use AI as a starting point, not the finished product. Challenge its suggestions, and edit ruthlessly.

Be you

• Think of AI as a highly-capable assistant with zero personality. It can help you get words on the page, but it can’t replicate the lived experiences or quirks of your brand.
• You need to run every AI draft through your brand voice filter. Does it sound like you? Honestly?
• Don’t be afraid to take a chainsaw to AI’s overly neat sentence structure. Vary sentence lengths to inject some rhythm and emphasis.
• Then read it out loud. If it doesn’t sound like something you’d say with a straight face to a customer, keep editing until it does.

Use sparingly

• As tempting as it might be to use AI to supercharge your productivity, keep the focus on quality not volume.
• I’m all for escalators, and I use AI a lot as a copywriter. It helps me push through blocks, spark ideas, and makes a lot of the grunt work quicker and easier. Especially on a sunny Friday afternoon.
• But if ever I find myself merrily copy-pasting AI responses with minimal edits, I know I could be drifting perilously close those desolate plains of generic insincerity.
• That’s when it’s time to take the stairs.

Want to give your brand a voice that’s actually yours? Let’s talk.

Rob, Copy Director at EM