How to use AI without losing your brand voice

If you have tried using AI to help with writing, you may have noticed a strange thing: your emails, posts and website copy can start to sound a little too similar to everyone else’s. Or just crap. That smooth, generic tone that AI tools default to is easy to spot, and once your customers spot it too, it can chip away at the trust you have built with your own voice.

You don’t need to completely avoid AI tools for writing; you just need to use them for the right things and teach them how you write, so when you do use them, what comes out still sounds like you.

Why Claude is a good place to start

Claude is well regarded as one of the strongest AI tools for writing tasks, and a large part of that comes down to how much context you can give it before you even start drafting. Two features make this particularly useful for protecting your brand voice.

  1. Projects
    Within Claude, you can set up a Project as a dedicated space for a specific area of your work, such as your business’s content, your client’s newsletter, or your own personal brand. You can add custom instructions that stay in place for every conversation inside that Project, and you can upload documents so Claude always has your background material to hand rather than you having to explain it again each time.
  2. Memory
    Claude can also draw on relevant details from your past conversations, so the more you use it for your writing, the more consistent it can get at recognising how you like things phrased, without you repeating yourself every session.

Set these up once, with good instructions and the right samples, and you save yourself from having to reintroduce your business every time you open a chat.

Reverse-engineering your tone of voice

The most reliable way to keep AI output sounding like you is to feed it a good spread of your own writing and ask it to study it properly before it drafts anything.

Gather samples from across your business, such as:

  • LinkedIn posts
  • Blog posts or articles
  • Emails to clients
  • Website copy
  • Proposals

Make sure you don’t use anything that’s confidential. If a proposal or email contains client names, figures or anything sensitive, either leave it out or remove those details first.

How to download your old LinkedIn posts

LinkedIn lets you request a full copy of your data, which includes a file of everything you have posted.

  1. Go to Settings and Privacy.
  2. Select Data Privacy.
  3. Choose Get a copy of your data.
  4. Select the option for your full data archive rather than the basic profile export, since this includes your post history.
  5. Request the download. LinkedIn typically sends a link by email within a day or two.
  6. Once it arrives, look for the file named Shares, which holds the text of the posts you have written yourself (not the reactions or comments you have left on other people’s posts, which are stored separately).

What to ask the AI tool to pay attention to

Once you have your samples together, don’t just paste them in and ask for a summary. Be specific about what you want it to notice, such as:

  • Sentence length, and whether you tend to write short and punchy or longer and more flowing.
  • Vocabulary choices, including words you gravitate towards and words you never use.
  • Punctuation habits, such as your use of dashes, brackets or capital letters for emphasis.
  • Humour, and whether it appears often, occasionally, or not at all (and bear in mind AI is not great at humour).
  • Phrases or words you repeat across different pieces.
  • The overall energy and personality that comes through.
  • Things you deliberately never do, such as using exclamation marks, jargon, or a particular sales-y turn of phrase.

Ask the AI tool to summarise these findings back to you before you start using it for actual drafts. This gives you a chance to correct anything that doesn’t feel right, and it gives you something you can save and reuse as a standing instruction going forward.

A useful extra: Formalizer

If you already have a piece of writing and want to quickly check how it would sound in a different register, a tool called Formalizer is worth trying. You paste in your text, choose a tone such as more professional, more informal, more to the point or grammatically correct, and it rewrites your text in that style while keeping the same content. Think of it as a style translator rather than a full writing tool. It won’t learn your voice the way a well-briefed Claude Project can, but it’s a fast way to test how a piece of copy holds up in a different tone before you send it out.

Keeping your voice consistent going forward

Once you have built up a clear picture of how you write and fed it into your tool of choice, the job isn’t finished. Review anything AI drafts for you before it goes out, and keep updating your samples as your writing develops. Voice work is never entirely done, but the effort you put in now will save you a lot of editing later, and it means your audience will keep recognising your business as your business, not as a slightly better version of everyone else’s.