You open a chat tool, ask for a LinkedIn post, an email, a plan, and the first draft looks fine. But something about it feels familiar, like you've read it before. You have, in someone else's post, written with the same tool, last week.
Here's what you get: four steps for any AI writing task, a prompt that builds them in, and why "just do the whole thing" is the instruction that costs you the most later.
Start with the basics
A language model is trained to predict the most likely answer. A generic question gets roughly the internet's average view on the topic, and the tuning that comes after training makes it worse, because the people who rate answers tend to reward what feels familiar, which narrows the range of what comes back. Nufar Gaspar, an AI consultant, tested this herself: she gave ChatGPT, Claude Opus and Gemini the same generic prompt, "write a LinkedIn post about how AI is changing marketing," in incognito mode. All three came back with a similar structure and strikingly similar content. When she reran it with her own point of view, her experience, and words she avoids, she got a far better starting point to edit, even if it still wasn't something she'd post as is.
Step 1: Ramble to the tool before you ask it for anything
Go for a walk, read what you need to, until you have a view of your own, however messy. Then talk to the tool, don't type a request yet, tell it everything: what you've heard, what worries you, what you're sure you don't want. Let it find the structure afterward, not before.
Step 2: State how sure you are, and ask it to push back
Models are built to agree with you, so if you show up with a strong opinion, it'll probably help you justify it instead of testing it. Tell it explicitly how confident you are and how hard you want it to argue, for example "I'm about 60% sure the problem is onboarding, push back hard before you agree with me." Even when you're sure, ask for the counter view anyway.
Step 3: Ask for six directions, not one draft
The first answer is usually the most probable one, which makes it the most average one too. Ask for six directions that differ in approach, angle and structure, some borrowed from another field, how a journalist would build it, how a game designer would. Have the tool argue briefly for each one, then look at them side by side, note what you like in each, what's missing from all of them, and follow whichever pulled you in.
Step 4: Decide where you'll step in, before you start
"Just do the whole thing end to end" sounds like the most efficient instruction, but it does the most damage, because a polished, finished draft makes it feel wrong to throw out, even when the direction is off. Decide your checkpoints in advance, the outline, the first section, the draft, so you review at the point where a fix or a full pivot is still cheap.
This phrasing matters because it forces the tool to show you the range before you lock onto the first answer, which is probably also the most average one.
Wait, before you ask for "the whole thing"
Once you see a finished draft, it's psychologically hard to go back, and the tools themselves make it technically harder too. If your checkpoint is the outline instead of the finished draft, the change is still cheap.
Next ten minutes
Pick one writing task in front of you today. Before you open the tool, talk to it for a full minute, without thinking about structure. Then use the prompt above, and decide right now which stage you want to stop and check.