Why your AI sounds nothing like you, even though you have corrected it 1,000 times

The work you skipped is the work the tool needs.

You've done the thing.

You've trained ChatGPT (or Claude, or whatever else you've ended up trusting) on a folder of your old emails, three of your best Substack pieces, the brand guidelines from 2019, and a pep talk you wrote yourself one Sunday night when the tea had gone cold and you were determined to get your messaging sorted.

You've asked it to draft a LinkedIn post, or a welcome sequence, or a pitch for a partnership that might actually move the needle.

And what came back was OK. Technically fine. Grammatically immaculate. Tonally polished. Completely interchangeable with the same post written for the next ten established businesswomen whose businesses are built on an environmental focus, who asked their tool of choice to do the same thing this morning.

It doesn't sound like all of you. It sounds like the broad average of every sustainable-business-with-a-purpose voice currently being amplified across the internet.

You assume this is the AI's fault. It is not.

It's not the tool's fault

I am super lucky to have the awesome Amey Lee, founder of Heart Content, as a member of my tribe. She came on the Women in Business podcast recently, and said the line that has been replaying in my head ever since:

…a brand story strategy will train the model to your brand. It is the first piece of the puzzle in getting your brand to be understood by ChatGPT or Claude.

Not the optional piece. Not the eventually-when-things-settle piece. The first piece.

All the AI actually does is take the average and amplify. Whatever you put underneath it gets louder. Clear strategy gets louder. Vague strategy gets louder. A precise voice gets louder. A voice that hasn't yet been articulated gets louder too, and what you hear back is the placeholder it filled in for you. The broad average. The most statistically likely sentence a sustainable business owner might write.

That's what the slop is. Not laziness. Not the wrong tool. The sound of an amplifier with nothing specific to work with.

The business worked. Then you changed.

For most established businesswomen whose businesses are built on an environmental focus, this is where it stings. Because the business worked. For years. Without ever having to articulate, in precise current language, who you serve, what you stand for now, and the actual work you do today. The business was the articulation. The customers showed up. The work spoke for itself.

And then the woman running it and the world around her changed. The business and its systems haven't caught up. There's nothing 'written down' that's AI-friendly for the tool to amplify that is unmistakably and unapologetically YOU.

So it amplifies the closest thing it can find.

The old you, your old messages. Or worse: the public average of every other woman in your category, blended into a paste.

This is the bit nobody is selling courses about. They are about the prompts, the workflows, the seventeen tools, the agent stack, the promise that if you just buy their thing, all will be awesome. Useful, sometimes. None of it is the work the tool actually needs from you.

What it needs from you is clear direction around who you serve, why those people, how you want to show up, and what you want to say. There is nothing new there, the prerequisites for great communication have stayed the same, what has changed is that AI can't hear what's not being said, so what you get is something that sounds plausible but it will probably be beige and derivative.

Anchor before Amplify

Anchor before Amplify. Always in that order.

The order matters more now than it did five years ago, precisely because the amplification is so much louder. A vague brand on a static website is forgettable. A vague brand poured through six AI-generated assets a week is exhausting, for you to write, and for everyone else to read.

So if your AI keeps producing content that doesn't sound like you, the work isn't to find a better prompt. The work is to do the Anchor piece the prompt is asking you to skip. Niche, in current language. Voice, in current language. The version of you who is running this business now.

That's the bit that turns the amplifier into something useful. That's also the bit only you can do. The tool can't anchor for you. It can only echo what's already anchored.

If this is the moment you've felt yourself in, the asking, the rewriting, the closing of the tab in mild despair, you are not behind. You are exactly where the work begins. The same work that has always been the foundation of every business that managed to sound like itself. Just made more obvious by a tool that finally tells you, in a hundred polished words, what is missing.

You can hear the full conversation with Amey Lee on the Women in Business podcast, wherever you listen. Twelve years of brand story strategy, and a particularly clear way of explaining why this work can't be skipped.