Making AI content that isn't trash?

I was a borderline AI hater until about 6 months ago, mostly because it just wasn’t very good. But that’s just not true anymore— the models have leveled up a LOT.

And the stuff I’ve been doing lately with AI is so damn good that even the old me (the AI hater from last year) has changed his tune.

For example, I think this is a damn good article that’s better than what 90% of humans would create— and it’s 100% AI, using the workflow I’m sharing below.

The basic idea is combining two data sets with the right prompt:

🧠 Knowledge base 

This is the raw material for all the content you’ll generate with AI. Gather as much of your IP as possible: your website, sales decks, workshops, video scripts, LinkedIn posts, etc.

Save them as PDFs or TXT and upload along with your prompt.

The AI will reference this stuff first, and anything that’s not covered will get sourced from it’s general training data which is more or less the “average” of consensus internet opinion— literally the most generic idea possible.

Eg, if I asked it to write something about “how to create YouTube videos” without any of my knowledge as source material, it would give me something very bland and generic:

But if I give it some of the slides from my YouTube coaching material, it already gives me something much more interesting and different:

More is generally better: for one client I compiled all their podcast transcripts, all their blog posts and some lead magnets into another, and the combined total was 900 pages.

And it's usually ok if they're rough, weirdly formatted, etc-- the AI is good at extracting the ideas, so don't worry about cleaning them up. This is a big, raw infodump. Save them as PDFs or TXT and upload along with your prompt (here’s an example).

You have the raw materials, now you need to give the idea some creative direction:

📚 Style guide

This is how you'll make sure that it sounds like YOU, not an AI: just give it an example of your writing to match for tone and structure. Save these as TXT or PDF and upload them with your prompt— this part is pretty straightforward.

Ideally you want one example for each type of content you’ll produce, eg newsletter, social media caption, video script, blog post, etc. But you can start with a single example and still get great results.

👩‍💻 Prompt 

Here’s where you bring it all together: what source material & style reference to use, who you are, your goals, and any formatting details that matter.

Eg, "I'm the founder of a product design agency called XYZ & Co which specializes in banking apps. I'm creating SEO articles to get subscribers for our newsletter."

I could write 10 pages just on the nuances of the prompt, but here’s two big ideas that will help a lot:

More isn't always better

Sometimes getting too detailed will force the AI into a direction that’s limiting/bad. I suggest starting with a pretty lightweight prompt and adding context as needed until you get to the right place.

Try breaking it down into smaller steps

Sometimes you can give it a big prompt like the one above, tell it to write an entire SEO article, and you’ll get great results (a “one-shot” prompt). If that works, great— but usually, you’ll get better results from breaking it into pieces.

The reason is that AIs are kind of like a big guessing machine. They don’t “know” anything, they just predict things based on your input. So the more things you ask it to guess at once, the more likely it is to guess wrong (and that’s when you get hallucinations, weird tone, etc).

So for an SEO article, you could try breaking it into these steps:

• Ask for 5 ideas for articles on the topic of [insert topic here]

• Pick one of the ideas and ask it to write an outline based on that.

• Adjust the outline as needed (“add a bullet point about X to section 2”)

• Once the outline is in good shape, ask it to create the full article

To be clear, I’m not saying those are the exact right steps for any SEO article— that will be different for every project.

My point is just that breaking down big, complex tasks into smaller ones is a very important part of using AI well (and beyond that, systems thinking is the most important skill to have in the AI world).

Now here's the not-so-secret sauce:

✨ Use Gemini 2.5 Pro

In my personal opinion, ChatGPT isn’t great for creating written content. It’s like Domino’s pizza: it gets the job done, but kinda underwhelming.

Gemini 2.5 Pro is Google's newest model from March, and it's VERY noticeably better at writing than ChatGPT. Check it out at https://gemini.google.com/ if you haven’t.

The UI isn’t as polished as ChatGPT, but I do like Canvas mode which is essentially a Google Docs-like UI where you can apply AI to specific sections of your document.

Give it all the right knowledge and style guides and you might find yourself getting a little freaked out because it can be THAT good ("It must be reading my thoughts!!”).

👩‍🏫 Extra credit

Prompting is great, but automation opens up a whole other world of options.

And you can automate all of this via the Google AI Studio API and/or various no-code automation apps— I like Make, but Gumloop, n8n, and Zapier are all viable too.

For example the above Make automation takes my input from Google Sheets (topic, source material, product links, etc), creates an article, inserts a YouTube embed, and saves the result into another Google sheet as HTML. Then we export that as a CSV and import the CSV into Wordpress— the whole process takes about 90 seconds per article.

Here’s an example— not QUITE as good as doing it “manually,” but pretty great considering I didn’t touch it at all.

Damn, you’re still reading?

Shoutout to you for sticking around— that was a big infodump, and it’s probably only about 50% of what I could get into here. But these details are the difference between AI slop and creating something that’s 90% as good as what you’d do on your best day.

The main takeaway is simple:

You get out of AI what you put in. If you give it a generic prompt with no original ideas, you’ll get generic AI slop back.

If you only do one thing I talked about in this email, try uploading some of your knowledge and see what happens— that alone will make a massive difference.

PS - If you like my emails, reply to this and say hi! I don’t have any room for new clients right now so I have nothing to sell you, but I always like talking with people 🥳