AI Playbook: How to Use AI for Content & Copy (Responsibly)

Justin Arnold

Head of Content

Written on
April 16, 2025

AI tools are everywhere. And depending on who you ask, they’re either ushering in a new golden age of productivity – or quietly killing off originality. (Perhaps both opinions could be right?)

The truth is less dramatic, but more important: most AI-generated content is painfully average.

It’s safe, derivative, and often built on foundations that aren’t particularly strong to begin with. Ask any tool to explain a familiar topic, and what you usually get back is a polite remix of what’s already been said a hundred times before – just with fewer typos.

That’s not to say AI isn’t useful. It is. But most content teams and marketers aren’t using it well. They’re asking it to do the job of an expert writer, a strategist, or a domain specialist – and it can’t.

What it can do, and what it does remarkably well, is act as a fast, efficient assistant. A second brain for sorting, analyzing, repackaging, and refining your own thinking.

There is a danger in relying on AI to generate ideas, structure arguments, and write first drafts. Unless you have a razor-sharp ability to think critically and creatively when reviewing content that is generated, you’re at risk of working backward. AI-generated first drafts might be a viable way to push past writer’s block, and to get ‘something on the page’, but this inevitably requires a very great deal of critical evaluation, adaptation, development, and a keen eye for originality of thought. Anything less than this, and you’re putting AI in the creative driving seat and restricting your own creativity with more seatbelts than you’d need to secure an elephant in a Formula One car.

This article is for founders & content teams that want to use AI properly – without falling into the trap of lazy automation. We’re going to cover when to use it, how to use it, and just as critically, when to leave it out of the process entirely.

Because, in the end, AI isn’t the threat. Misusing it is.

Why AI-Generated Content Often Fails

AI tools are trained on what already exists.

They can’t form new ideas. They don’t know what’s important or what’s irrelevant. They’ve never done the work, spoken to customers, or seen an idea fall flat in a pitch meeting. Their job is to predict the most likely next word – not to challenge, persuade, or lead.

So what you end up with is technically correct, but emotionally and strategically empty. Content that feels passable. Sometimes even slick. But not meaningful.

It’s usually missing three key ingredients:

1. Original thought
You can’t remix your way into originality. AI tools generate content based on statistical patterns in their training data. That means even when the structure looks convincing, it’s still just a stitched-together version of other people’s ideas. Useful if you’re summarizing existing knowledge. Pointless if you’re trying to lead with a perspective.

2. A strong voice
Most AI content is built to be inoffensive. It avoids taking a stance. It softens clear ideas into vague suggestions. That’s by design – tools are tuned to avoid risk, bias, and controversy. But great content often does the opposite. It takes a clear position. It pushes back. It sounds like a real person wrote it.

3. Human texture
Humor, storytelling, opinion, rhythm, emotion – these things are nearly impossible to simulate well without a human touch. Ask an LLM to “make this more engaging” and you’ll usually get a listicle full of clichés and transitions like “In today’s digital age…” or “Let’s dive in.” It’s the writing equivalent of white bread.

This isn’t a condemnation of AI tools. It’s a reminder of what they are: systems designed to reflect, not originate. When you ask them to lead the creative process, they do exactly what they’re supposed to do – just not what you actually need.

AI Is a Powerful Assistant – But a Poor Leader

The real problem isn’t that AI can’t write. It’s that too many people expect it to.

We’ve seen the same scenario again and again: a blank page, a prompt like “Write a blog post about [topic],” and a few seconds later – 1,200 words of passable, context-free filler. It looks like content. It reads like content. But it doesn’t say anything.

And it misses the entire point of content marketing: to demonstrate expertise, earn trust, and move people.

If you’re asking AI to handle the strategy, structure, and substance of your work, you’re putting the intern in charge of the business.

That doesn’t mean AI has no place. In the right hands, at the right point in the process, it can save time, reduce repetition, and even improve the final result. But only when it follows the creative direction – not when it sets it.

At ScaleMath, we recognize the huge advantages that AI offers, and it can certainly be helpful for idea generation, for creating initial outlines, as well as very, very rough first drafts. It can help get you from blank page to started. But that’s the key word: started.

AI isn’t a substitute for thinking. It’s a tool that can be used to kickstart the thinking. If you treat AI as the creative mind behind your business’s marketing strategy, you’re jeopardizing the authenticity, originality, personality, and purpose of your business.

If we use AI to generate first draft ideas, then it’s a clear three-stage process:

Highly specialized, detailed, and advanced prompts that are expertly crafted by professional content creators to elicit the best possible responses from AI.
First draft, outline, or proposals generated by AI in response to these prompts, along with supporting material.
Ruthless editing and development to evolve the article far beyond anything the AI tool could generate. This involves combining years of expert experience and knowledge to take the article from its initial starting point to a finalized piece of work we can be proud of.

We also find AI can be invaluable for tasks that need to be carried out after we’ve done the thinking.

That might mean:

Repurposing a blog post into short-form content
Tightening a dense paragraph into something clearer
Rewriting for tone or format without losing the message
Stress-testing an argument by asking for counterpoints

When you lead with experience, AI helps speed things up. When you let it lead, you slow the work down – because you still have to rework what it gives you into something credible, useful, and worth reading.

A tool that helps you get to the final draft faster? Great.

Where AI Helps – If You Use It at the Right Time

The value of AI in content creation isn’t in replacing the hard work. It’s in removing the busywork.

Used well, it can take on the tasks that slow teams down – sorting through transcripts, summarising dense material, cleaning up formatting, and suggesting alternatives to awkward phrasing. Tasks where speed matters more than style.

But timing is everything. Use AI too early in the process and it narrows your thinking. Ask it to generate an outline before you’ve formed your own point of view, and you’re already starting on rails – locked into ideas it’s pulled from other sources, whether they’re good or not.

Here’s where it does make sense to bring it in:

After you’ve defined your perspective
You know what you want to say. Now you want to test it. AI can help surface gaps, challenge your logic, or suggest what else readers might want to know. Think of it as a fast, reasonably intelligent editor – not a strategist.

When you’re summarising or restructuring
Taking a transcript and boiling it down to three key takeaways. Turning a long-form piece into bullet points for a pitch deck. Rewriting a blog intro without changing the substance. These are ideal tasks to delegate to AI.

To create variations, not the original
If you’ve written something strong and on-brand, AI can help adapt it – turning a blog section into a newsletter snippet, a case study into a LinkedIn post, or a longer article into a short social thread. The key is having something solid to start with.

To check clarity or accessibility
You can ask AI to simplify complex passages, flag unclear terms, or suggest edits to bring the reading level down without dumbing things down. That’s helpful when you’re too close to the work to see where readers might struggle.

The difference here is intent. You’re not asking AI to think for you – you’re using it to carry out clear, defined tasks. That’s where it works best. And where it saves you real time without sacrificing quality.

Prompting Is a Skill – And Most People Are Bad at It

There’s a persistent myth that using AI is easy. Open a chat window, type a vague instruction, wait a few seconds, copy the result, and you’re done.

This is exactly why so much AI-generated content is forgettable. Not because the tools are bad – but because the prompts are.

Prompting is a skill. It requires clarity, context, and specificity. The more thought you put in, the more useful the output.

Weak prompts usually sound like this:

“Write a blog post about the benefits of email marketing.”

What you get back is exactly what you’d expect: five predictable paragraphs about open rates and audience engagement, all written in a voice that sounds like a marketing textbook with a personality disorder.

Better prompting starts with a clear role, goal, and constraint. You’re not delegating the idea – you’re guiding a response to fit a specific purpose.

Here are some examples of better prompts, depending on the task:

To generate structural alternatives:

“Here’s an outline for an article on why most SEO content fails. Can you suggest 2–3 alternative ways to structure this piece, based on different reader priorities – e.g., urgency vs. long-term strategy?”

Now you’re not asking it to do the thinking. You’re asking it to challenge your structure and help you rethink flow.

To adapt your own writing for a different audience:

“This article is written for in-house content strategists. Rewrite the following section for an agency founder with limited hands-on content experience, without dumbing down the language or removing nuance.”

This keeps control in your hands, but gets AI working where it’s good: adjusting framing and tone.

To help expand a dry section you’ve already written:

“This paragraph explains why using AI too early in the process limits originality. Can you suggest two stronger examples or analogies that reinforce the point – nothing clichéd or generic, please.”

You’ve written the idea. You’re just asking for new ways to illustrate it, not hand over authorship.

To pull quotes or examples from raw material:

“Here’s a transcript from a 30-minute call. Extract any specific, non-obvious quotes related to SEO metrics and content quality. Ignore greetings, filler, or surface-level commentary.”

This replaces tedious scanning with fast extraction – exactly where AI excels.

To audit your draft for tone or style issues:

“Here’s the full draft of a blog post. Identify any phrases that sound generic, overused, or inconsistent with a confident, conversational tone. Don’t rewrite – just highlight where the tone drops.”

That gives you feedback, not unsolicited rewriting.

None of these prompts rely on AI to think for you. They rely on you to think with AI – to know what you want, and give just enough detail to get something useful in return.

It’s the difference between asking someone to do your job for you, and asking a skilled assistant to help you do it better.

Don’t Let AI Anywhere Near the Blank Page

The moment you invite AI in too early, you risk losing control.

Ask it to write the first draft, and you’re starting with someone else’s assumptions, structure, tone, and priorities. Even if you edit it heavily, the foundation is flawed. It’s not your voice. It’s not your thinking. And most of the time, it’s not even very good.

Starting with AI feels efficient. But for most people, it really isn’t.

You spend longer correcting bad tone, reshaping arguments, stripping out generic filler, and forcing in the perspective that should’ve been there to begin with. You end up massaging flat copy into something acceptable – rather than starting strong with a clear idea and turning it into something great.

If you’re truly any good at what you do, this is where your value lies. In the thinking. The insight. The shaping of something others couldn’t – or wouldn’t – say. AI can’t do any of that for you.

So if you’re staring at a blank page and feeling tempted, do this instead:

Write the opening paragraph yourself. Just one. Make it sharp. Make it clear.
Write out the headlines of the points you want to make – even if they’re rough.
Leave notes in square brackets for what you want to come back to later.

Now you’re not working from a prompt. You’re working from a position of intent.

Once you’ve got that – your structure, your key arguments, your voice – you can bring AI in to help. Ask it to test the logic. Ask it to fill a small gap. Ask it to check if your structure makes sense. But don’t give it a blank page and expect it to build something worth keeping.

It’s not a writer. It’s an assistant. Let it assist.

Content Created With AI Can Still Be Great – If Humans Stay in Control

We’re not saying AI content can’t be good.

We’re saying good content still needs a human in charge.

It needs clarity of thought, a clear point of view, and a voice that actually sounds like someone. That doesn’t happen by handing the job over to a machine. It happens when someone experienced – someone with skin in the game – uses AI intentionally.

That might mean using AI to:

Rework a strong paragraph into a different tone or format
Repurpose a long-form article into something shorter and more focused
Quickly pull out highlights from a transcript, call, or report
Turn a list of raw ideas into something structured and usable
Identify weaknesses in a draft that’s nearly there

These are all perfectly valid. And more than that – they’re smart.

They make use of what AI is genuinely good at: speed, formatting, rephrasing, summarising, and comparison. Not decision-making. Not direction. Not originality.

You still need someone who knows when a piece is flat. When a sentence buries the point. When an argument doesn’t hold. When something sounds right but says nothing.

That’s not something AI can be trained to spot – because it’s often not about rules. It’s about judgment. And judgment only comes from experience.

So yes, AI is part of the workflow now. But if you want to produce content that actually says something – and gets results – then the only model that matters is the one in your chair.

What Readers Want – And What AI Can’t Fake

There’s a simple reason AI-generated content so often falls flat.

It’s not because the grammar is wrong. It’s not because the structure is broken. It’s because it lacks intent.

Real readers want something more than just information. They want clarity. They want relevance. They want someone who knows what they’re talking about, and isn’t afraid to take a stance. They want to feel like the person writing understands their context – because they’ve lived it.

AI can’t fake that.

It can list features, summarise opinions, and string together arguments that sound plausible. But it can’t care. It can’t choose what matters. And it certainly can’t inject the kind of nuance, timing, or dry humor that lets a reader know: a real person wrote this for me.

You can spot the difference instantly. The AI version is polished, polite, and forgettable. The human version might be sharper, riskier, or more specific – but it holds your attention. Because it sounds like someone who has something worth saying.

Here’s the real tell: Great content doesn’t just answer the reader’s question. It says, “You’re not the only one thinking this,” or “Here’s what nobody else will say out loud.” AI doesn’t do that. Not because it isn’t technically capable – but because it’s not allowed to.

It’s trained to be inoffensive. Neutral. Safe. Which means it’s almost always predictable. And predictable doesn’t convert.

If your content sounds like it could have been written by anyone, your audience will treat it that way.

So, by all means, use AI to help you write faster. But if you want your content to be remembered, it still needs to be produced with help from a human worth listening to.

Conclusion – We (as humans) still need to be able to think.

AI will keep getting faster. It’ll get better at mimicking tone. And it will only continue to get better at producing drafts that sound human.

But it still won’t know your audience. It won’t know what’s worth saying. And it won’t know when to break the rules to make a point.

That’s your job.

The real opportunity in all of this isn’t to write faster for the sake of it – it’s to spend less time on mechanical work, and more time on what actually matters:

Shaping stronger arguments
Developing ideas that stick
Crafting messages that reflect what your brand really stands for
Saying something original, clearly, and on purpose

The takeaway is this: AI can support you, if you choose to use it responsibly. If your content relies entirely on automation, it’ll blend in. If it’s shaped by professionals who know how to use AI well, it’ll stand out.

Don’t fear the tools. Just don’t hand over the reins. Use AI like any other assistant (or new employee on your team) – task-specific, helpful, and never unsupervised.

Because the best content still starts with thinking.

And the best thinking still starts with you.

At ScaleMath, we don’t just publish content for the sake of it. We operate & advise companies on growth strategy (and actually execute on it). Led by humans who know when (and how) to bring in AI and when to stay well away from it.

If you want content that:

Puts clarity over clichés
Reflects real experience, not recycled noise
Is guided by thinking, not templated prompts

…then you’re in the right place.

Let’s talk about how we can help your business create content that’s human-led, performance-focused, and anything but generic.

Let’s start the conversation – get in touch with us today.

Frequently Asked Questions

Can I use AI to write full blog posts?

Technically, yes. Strategically, no.

If you’re publishing AI-written posts without human input, you’re gambling with quality, credibility, and brand voice. At best, it’ll be passable. At worst, it’ll damage trust.

A better approach: write it yourself, then use AI to strengthen it – tighten arguments, rework headlines, highlight weak transitions. Treat AI like a sharp editor, not the author.

What are some examples of better prompts for content creation?

The difference between a bad prompt and a good one is the difference between “fill this space” and “solve this problem”. Here are a few that give AI something useful to work with:

To test an argument:

“Here’s a paragraph arguing that AI weakens originality in content. Challenge the logic – what might a counterpoint be, and how could I strengthen my original claim?”

To improve tone:

“Rewrite this paragraph in a confident, professional tone – cut any fluff or clichés, but keep the message intact.”

To help reframe content for a new audience:

“This article is aimed at experienced marketers. Adapt it for junior content writers without oversimplifying.”

To generate comparison or structure:

“Suggest two alternative ways to frame an article about the risks of overusing AI in copywriting – one for a skeptical audience, one for an over-reliant one.”

What are some signs I’m overusing AI?

You’re starting every project by asking ChatGPT for an outline.
You’re using AI drafts with only minor edits.
You’re struggling to explain your article’s core argument in your own words.
You’re relying on AI to “inspire” ideas you could develop better yourself.
Everything you publish sounds polite and professional – and completely forgettable.

If you’re using AI as a crutch instead of a lever, it’ll show.

Can AI help me if I don’t consider myself a great writer?

Yes – as long as you’re clear on the message.

AI can help you structure messy thoughts, rewrite awkward phrasing, or summarise research. It can’t decide what matters or what you want to say. If you can do that part, AI can help sharpen the result.

But if you’re asking it to “write something good” without knowing what good looks like, you’ll struggle.

What’s the best way to incorporate AI into a professional content workflow?

Start with human ideas. Let the concept, outline, and message come from you.
Use AI for support. Structure testing, phrasing tweaks, grammar, and formatting.
Review with intent. Don’t accept anything unedited. Don’t publish anything you wouldn’t put your name to.
Document your standards. Include examples, tone guides, dos and don’ts. Treat AI like a junior team member – it performs better with clear guidance.
Keep control. Your strategy, your audience, your call.