Does you use AI?
Short answer: yes and no.
I often use AI to organize, brainstorm and plan marketing content, for both Executive Writers Room and my clients. I DON’T ever use AI to draft content. However, after I write a first draft of anything, I may occasionally use AI to find alternative phrasing on individual passages, but never to draft an entire work. Should any material be produced by AI, it’s also rigorously cross-checked and vetted before it’s approved for release.
By the way, any data used that is specific to an industry is always properly researched and sources provided. Data specific to clients is always provided directly by clients themselves.
Although I may occasionally kick off a research question with AI, it’s only ever as a starting point. I always perform follow-up research with trusted sources before referencing source material in any material I write.
I also occasionally use AI to generate images for the articles I write for this website. Never for my clients.
In the end, my business relies heavily on my reputation. Preserving it demands integrity and hard work, so it’s one of my top priorities.
AI False-Positive Disclaimer
As a professional business marketing and technical writer, I aim to deliver authoritative and highly accurate copy tailored for B2B audiences. To that end, I comply with strict grammatical standards, logical structuring, and specialized industry nomenclature.
AI detector algorithms scan for (among other things) predictability, structural consistency, and error-free syntax.
The result is that AI detectors will routinely generate false positives on high-level technical writing, meaning they will often misdiagnose clean, expert human writing like mine as machine-generated. Unfortunately this can’t be helped (because heaven knows I’ve tried).
How do you address AI false positives?
Quite frankly, this is something I’ve been struggling with for a while. It happens a lot more often than most people know, and yet there’s little professionals like myself can do about it.
But maybe one way I can address it is by sharing more about myself and my background, so here goes.
I grew up in an academic family, and nearly all my relatives are writers or have a love of writing. I’ve had a knack for grammar and spelling since I was in primary school. Then I developed skills for communicating technical concepts while coming up in the 1990s and 2000s.
In other words, I earned my skills the hard way. Or the right way. Or the legitimate way. Or whatever way you want to put it. I’m a born-and-raised writer, and I’ve been writing and been around writers (specifically academic writers) since I was a kid. I mean, these people even speak with an elevated vocabulary and perfect grammar.
IYKYK.
As an adult, I built a career in marketing and business technology, fields that demand a certain type of writing and a certain level of rigorous accuracy.
Bottom line is that I’ve spent a lifetime honing my writing skills and now I just naturally write the way I write.
Obviously, I’ve had no control over how AI has modelled its own writing, which apparently has been by learning and drawing averages from volumes of similar material to mine. Even, I’m guessing, including mine.
What I can tell you though is that since the day those false-positive results were first brought to my attention, I’ve had more than one full-on panic attack about it. Was I finished? After all this time and effort, did I have to pack it in? Or, if I was going to continue my career in writing, how was I even going to manage the false positive problem?
What followed were months of learning how AI detectors work, and what I could do to “humanize” my writing (whatever that means… I mean, I’m human already, for Pete’s sake).
But in the end, I realized that “dumbing down” or “messy-ing” my writing, or even changing my writing voice in the context of technical subjects just didn’t feel right. So I decided then that I simply wasn’t going to compromise myself like that.
Now, all I can say is that this is how I actually write. What you see on this site, and everything I produce for my clients is, to the best of my abilities, professional grade material.
And let’s face it, no one should accept anything less.
If you have any further questions about my writing or my process, please feel free to DM me.