Every writer knows the feeling. You ask AI for a draft, it gives you something perfectly reasonable, and you rewrite almost all of it.
It's fine. It just sounds nothing like you. Too many big words. A tidy summary at the end you'd never write. A phrase you've never used in your life.
So you sigh, fix it and move on. Next week it does it again.
Beth Ayers, CEO of Metomic, does something different, and she shared it at aiblLIVE in London on 20 October. It's the simplest idea I heard all day, and possibly the most useful.
The question that does the teaching
After she rewrites the AI's draft, she gives both versions back to it and asks one question.
"Why is my draft different to your draft?"
"And it's amazing," she said. "It analyses it and comes up with all of these rules that I never would have known myself, and then we create those rules."
By her account, one day of comparing her emails with the AI's drafts produced about fifteen new rules. A couple she shared will be familiar to anyone who writes for a living.
"Don't use an idiom you haven't heard me use."
"Don't summarise the whole conversation back."
Those rules then go into a file the AI reads at the start of every session. So the next draft is a little closer. And the one after that closer still.
Coach it like a person
The way Beth talked about this sounded more like managing a team than using software. One of her rules was literally "coach it like you'd coach a team member."
In the Q&A she put it plainly: think about "how you manage AI in the same way that you manage people." As she sees it, all of your management skills are needed to do AI well.
I like that a lot. A good manager explains what was wrong and why, so it doesn't happen again. Most of us do the silent fix with AI every day, then wonder why it never learns.
It works for other things too. When the AI forgets to do something, Beth asks it why it can't remember, and they fix the cause together.
Your voice is the product
If you run a small business, your voice is part of what people buy. The way you write an email, a proposal or a post is a big part of why customers trust you. Hand that to a tool that sounds like everyone else and you lose something you can't easily get back.
This habit is how you keep it. A few minutes of asking "why is mine different?" turns the AI from a generic writer into one that's learning you.
I've been writing for a long time, including a whole book, Done Beats Perfect. I know what my writing sounds like. Getting the AI to know it too is a job I'm now taking seriously.
How would your week change if your first draft from AI needed a light edit rather than a full rewrite?
Hours back, for one thing. But the bigger win is confidence. You could hand off a client email or a newsletter and know it will still sound like you when it lands.
Next time you rewrite something AI drafted for you, it might be worth pasting both versions back in. Then ask it: "What's different about mine, and what rules should you follow next time?" I'd love to hear what it tells you.
