Show Notes

Writing with AI is one of the most talked about topics in small business marketing right now, and one of the most misunderstood. In this episode of The Localist podcast, recorded live at Localist Lab in Birmingham, Janna Stevens, Communications Director at Infomedia, walks a live audience through how to actually use AI for your writing without losing your voice.

Janna is a career writer with a graduate degree in writing studies. She has been writing website and marketing copy for the better part of her career, and she has spent the last few years figuring out where AI fits into a writer’s process. She is honest from the start: writing with AI is genuinely useful in some places and a complete trap in others. The question is not whether you should use AI. The question is whether you are still doing the thinking.

Janna covers where AI earns its keep: Drafting structured writing like job descriptions and press releases. Repurposing a long blog post into social captions. Editing and tightening copy. Grammar and quality checks. Document summarization. Research and brainstorming. She also covers where AI falls short. The output is intentionally average. It flattens your brand voice. It does not know your audience the way you do. Even when you upload a brand guide, AI pattern matches against it instead of internalizing it. And the iteration loop often takes longer than writing the thing yourself.

The second half of the talk is practical. Janna walks through how to write a stronger prompt, why prompts need personality and emotional context, how to add something real to your copy that AI could never know, why you should usually delete the first paragraph, and why asking AI to critique your writing is usually better than asking it to create. The episode ends with a live audience Q&A on em dashes, AEO, platform choices and how important words really are on a website. If you are writing with AI for your small business and want to do it well, this is a clear and honest guide.

Writing with AI Topics Covered in This Episode

Why writing with AI feels suspicious right now and what that means for career writers
Where AI earns its keep: drafts, structured writing, repurposing, editing and grammar checks
How to use AI for document summarization, research and brainstorming
Why AI output is intentionally average and what that means for your brand
Why AI confuses helpfulness with accuracy
How AI flattens your brand voice and an example with Rupert the cat
Why uploading your brand guide is not enough
The iteration loop and when AI takes longer than writing it yourself
Why everyone is starting to sound the same on the internet
How to write a stronger prompt and what to include
Why prompts with emotional context get better results
The “would I say this” test for AI-generated copy
How to add something real that AI could not possibly know
Why you should usually delete the first paragraph
Why asking AI to critique is better than asking it to create
Audience Q&A: em dashes, AEO, platforms and website copy

Mentioned in This Episode

Follow Carrie Rollwagen

Connect with Janna Stevens

Janna Stevens is the Communications Director at Infomedia. She has written copy for dozens of websites and has worked in digital strategy for almost a decade. She is a former teacher and an avid reader.

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Thanks to Our Sponsor, Infomedia

The Localist is sponsored by Infomedia. They are a Birmingham-based web and digital marketing company. They help small businesses grow online. Contact Infomedia.

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FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

Below is the full transcript of this Localist Lab episode with Janna Stevens of Infomedia. This transcript is provided for accessibility and SEO.

Carrie (00:12): Hi, I’m Carrie Rollwagen, host of The Localist. What you’re about to hear is a live recording from one of our Localist Lab events. This is when we bring in experts to talk about practical insights on marketing for small businesses. This session was recorded in front of a live audience, so you may hear some room noise and some shuffling around during the Q and A, but hopefully that just makes you feel more like you were actually there. For more background on the speaker, or to view slides from the event, check out our show notes, or you can also grab a ticket there to our next event. I hope you enjoy this conversation.

Carrie: Thank you for being here. My name is Carrie Rollwagen. I’m the author of The Localist book and host of The Localist podcast. On The Localist podcast, I interview small business owners, mostly from around Birmingham, some from around Alabama, about their experience. Localist Lab is the live version of the podcast, but at the lab events we bring in experts to deep dive into topics that we know are on the minds of small businesses.

Carrie: I want to thank Infomedia, Uptick Marketing, Tempo Websites and Infomedia Studios. Those are our sponsors today. Between all of our companies, we pretty much cover everything with digital strategy. If you want help with social media, email marketing, copywriting, launching a website, video, photos, marketing of any kind, we can help you with that. Today we are going to be talking about writing with AI: what works, what doesn’t and how to use it. Our speaker today is Janna Stevens. Janna is our Communications Director at Infomedia. She is a terrific writer. She has written copy for dozens of websites, worked in digital strategy for almost a decade, and is a former teacher and an avid reader. Welcome, Janna.

Janna (03:40): Hello. Okay, so buckle up. I’m going to air my grievances today. No, I’m just kidding. I was really excited when I was asked to give this talk, because I do have a lot of thoughts on the subject. I went to undergrad and grad school for writing studies. I have spent years learning and honing grammar and voice and style and structure. I was using em dashes before most people knew what they were, because a lot of people know what they are now, thanks to AI. I have been writing website and marketing copy for the better part of my career. And prior to that, for a year I taught middle school until they drove me away. So these days I have actually found myself second guessing a lot of my writing, because writing with correct grammar and correct punctuation means that I might look like a robot.

Janna: Those of us who have made writing our careers have spent years learning how to write well. And now it almost seems like writing well is a little bit suspicious. So that is a little bit offensive to me, but also I think that it’s pretty interesting. And what also is interesting is that I don’t think I’m alone. There’s a new mental checklist that has crept into the writing process for a lot of us writers. If you’re thinking about using an em dash, maybe change it to a semicolon instead. And if you want to use good vocabulary, oh, that might make your writing look a little too polished. Maybe dial it back some. So writers seem to be editing out the things that make writing good, because now AI is giving us clean writing that sounds good enough.

Janna: Writing has always been how I figure out what I think. I journal problems. I write essays about the real world and humans being human. AI writing tools are offering to skip that thinking step. Writing can be a pretty vulnerable practice. Making decisions can be uncomfortable, and having a point of view can be risky. AI reduces this. So it is not just saving time, it is saving discomfort.

Janna: Today I want to dig into writing with AI. We are going to talk about where it can help you, where it might cost you, and how to use it without losing your voice. The question is not whether we are going to use AI. Yes, we are. It is here, and it is not going to go away. The question is whether we are still doing the thinking.

Janna (06:20): Let’s talk about where AI can help. One of the biggest wins for me is that AI can help beat blank page paralysis. First drafts can be painful. Getting something down that you can react to is genuinely useful. There have been many occasions where I have used the voice to text feature in Claude to brain dump what I am trying to say and what I want to accomplish. It gives me a starting point.

Janna: AI is also really good at structured writing. Job descriptions, press releases, cover letters, meeting recaps. Things that are formulaic. If you give AI a format and facts, it can organize them for you. Repurposing content is another good use. If you have a long blog post and you want to turn it into captions for social media, or you have a slide deck and you want to turn it into an email, AI can help.

Janna: Editing and tightening is also a great use. Sometimes I will drop in a block of copy and say make this shorter. You could also ask, what information am I burying. AI can be a pretty good outside perspective when you are too close to your own words. Do I still recommend having a human review your writing if possible? Yes. But all of us are busy, and something is better than nothing.

Janna: Grammar and quality checks is one of my favorite uses. It is fast and pretty reliable. I am the type of person who, when it comes to internal emails about subjects I am not really stoked about, AI can be a very good tool. If you have something sitting in your drafts and you can’t figure out how you want to tackle it, drop your ideas into AI and get a starting point. You are still going to have to heavily edit, because we can all tell when an email has been written by AI.

Janna: Document summarization is my current favorite use. You can hand AI a document, paste in a URL, or paste in a long article, and ask AI to summarize the key points. It can pull out what is relevant to your role. Do I let AI just read all my documents without looking at them myself? No. But it identifies the areas of a document I know I need to dig into more.

Janna: Research and analysis is another great use. I have a workflow set up in Claude that pulls in the latest news across web development, design, content and SEO, and summarizes what is worth knowing. I have another workflow that pulls writing news and marketing news for my own LinkedIn content. The output is never a finished post. It is a starting point. The research grunt work is something AI can handle really well. You can set this up for your own industry. Pick your topics, point AI in the right direction, let it do the weekly scan.

Janna: And brainstorming. AI is good at giving you ideas. Maybe not always the best ideas. You can give it a prompt and say, which subject line would be good for this. If you ask AI for 10 options, most likely seven or eight will be pretty bad. But maybe a couple will be worth riffing on.

Janna: Think about AI like a microwave. It is a real tool. It does real things. But would you use a microwave to bake a birthday cake for someone you really care about? I hope not. AI works best as a starting point, not a finisher.

Janna (12:00): Now my favorite part. Where AI falls short. AI output is intentionally average. Average in this digital world is not going to cut it anymore. AI is trained to be agreeable. It produces things meant to offend no one and resonate with everyone. That is the very definition of forgettable. AI’s output is technically correct. It is also emotionally beige. It completes the task and does not do more than that.

Janna: At a previous Localist Lab, Pam gave a really good talk about AEO, answer engine optimization, and how average content is just not going to get you seen. Average means forgettable.

Janna: A side note. AI wants to be helpful, and people confuse helpfulness with accuracy. Imagine I send over some copy for you to review, maybe an About page. You paste it into ChatGPT and ask how it could be improved. AI will suggest improvements because you asked it to. People probably would not use AI as much if it responded honestly with, this is pretty solid, I wouldn’t touch anything. AI generates possibilities. Possibilities are not the same as problems. AI does not know which choices a copywriter made on purpose. Maybe a headline is short because it goes in a website banner. Maybe a sentence is blunt because the brand voice is blunt. AI sees text. It does not see intention. So it improves things that may not need improvement.

Janna (14:00): AI flattens your voice. If your brand has any edge, AI will sand it down. It can’t hold the tension that makes a voice interesting. Average output means generic. I want to show you an example. This is Rupert. He is my cat. I recently wrote an essay about him. I also created a piece with AI. Read for a second and decide which one sounds like it was actually written by someone who loves this cat. AI takes out the things that make the cat special. It does not mention his powdered donut lips. It does not mention the name of his tail. Yes, this tail has a name. It is Andrew. AI will remove the things readers connect with the most. That is not inherently bad. It is just boring.

Janna (16:00): AI does not know your audience. AI writes for a hypothetical reader. It does not matter if you tell AI who that audience is. You know your audience better. AI also can’t read your mind yet. You have been in your industry for years. You have a real point of view. You have client success stories. Even if you are good at prompting, all that context will not come through.

Janna: A question I get a lot is, can I not just upload my brand guide and messaging guide? Shouldn’t that be enough? You can. I have. You can give context to pretty much any AI writing tool. In my experience, you may spend time writing a detailed prompt, attach your brand guide, specify your tone and audience, tell it which words to avoid, and AI will still come back with something that’s close-ish but never exactly right. AI doesn’t actually understand your brand the way you do. It pattern matches. It can follow instructions, but it can’t internalize the feeling of a brand the way a human can. It does not know your history. It does not know that last year your company moved away from saying something a certain way. It does not know your CEO Jason hates a certain phrase.

Janna: There are also limits. The more information you stuff into a prompt, the more AI weighs and averages all of it together. So you get back something that technically checks all the boxes but somehow misses the point. And then there’s the iteration loop. AI is never going to nail your brand voice in one prompt. You reprompt it five times, then 10 times, and at some point you think, wouldn’t it be easier just to write this myself? Yes.

Janna: Sameness is getting worse. When everyone uses similar tools with similar prompts, the output starts to sound more and more the same. You become generic. And you are not remembered.

Janna (20:00): How do we use AI without losing our voice? You may have heard the phrase garbage in, garbage out. A lot of people have latched onto AI thinking it is a shortcut. In a lot of ways it is. But getting good output requires a good prompt. Writing a good prompt is its own skill. It takes thought and intention. And honestly, it takes a decent amount of writing ability.

Janna: Here is the difference. Someone types: write two paragraphs for my lawn care business service page about lawn pest control. The result on first glance looks good. Grammatically correct. Structured well. But it is generic. We did not specify where the business is. It mentions bugs that may not even be in your area.

Janna: Now a deeper prompt: you are a copywriter specializing in compelling website copy. Your client is a lawn care company in Birmingham, Alabama, whose competitors are Mighty Green Lawn Care and Weed Man. Write two paragraphs about lawn pest control. Include headers and subheads. The copy should be engaging enough to convince someone to choose this company while structured for AEO. Avoid jargon, avoid em dashes, use a warm professional tone. That prompt is a beast to write, but it gives me a result that is much closer to what I want.

Janna (22:00): Most people type a prompt like a Google search. Welcome email for new customers. That works. You will get a welcome email with a greeting, a thank you and a signature. But it will be impersonal and forgettable. AI does not know if you are writing for a lawn care company, a bakery or a software platform. So it fills in the blanks with the safest assumptions.

Janna: Better prompt: write an email for busy homeowners who do not have time to think about lawn care. The goal is relief. One more thing got crossed off their list. The tone should be warm but not overly enthusiastic. Notice we are not just describing the task. We are describing the emotion, the audience and the purpose.

Janna (23:00): Try the test of would I say this. Before you use AI-generated copy, read it out loud and ask, is this something I would say? Or is this something my business would actually say? If the answer is no, you need to rewrite it.

Janna: I gave a prompt for a LinkedIn post about writing with AI with a brand voice that has an edge. The output: let’s be real, AI is here to stay. The future is not AI versus humans, it is AI and humans working together for good. I am never going to say that. It is a strong post. Somebody else might use it. But it is not my voice.

Janna (23:30): Another tip: add something real. One of the fastest ways to make your content stronger than AI is to include something AI could never know. A client story. A conversation you had with a coworker last week. A mistake you made. An observation. AI example: strong customer service builds trust. Yes, we know. Human example: last month a customer emailed us at 10:47 PM because their site was down. We had someone respond and take care of it before midnight. The human example resonates so much better.

Janna (24:30): Delete the first paragraph. AI typically spends the first paragraph warming up. We were taught in school that introductions need to set up the entire piece. But the copy we write for our jobs rarely needs that. Try deleting the first paragraph and see if the piece is better. A welcome email: thank you for choosing Green Valley Lawn Care, we’re excited. The second paragraph is where the real content begins. Your lawn care program is officially underway. We will handle all of this for you. So you can spend less time worrying and more time enjoying your home. That first paragraph can just go.

Janna (25:00): Don’t ask AI what to think. AI is great for organizing ideas, but don’t use it to decide what is a good idea. Good prompt: summarize these meeting notes, turn this outline into an email. Not good: what should my company believe about this? What position should I take? Use your brain. You don’t need to ask AI what to think.

Janna (25:30): Finally, ask AI to critique, not create. Most people use AI as a generator. That is fine. But what if instead you prompted it to critique what you have already written? Questions you could ask: what questions would a skeptical reader have about this? Where is my argument the weakest? What am I assuming that is not explained? What is repetitive? Critique instead of create lets you maintain your voice while strengthening the piece.

Janna (26:00): If this session sounded contradictory, that is because it is. AI can be genuinely useful. It can help you get unstuck, organize information, brainstorm, edit and speed up tedious work. But everything we talked about today comes with a caveat. AI is good at generating options. It is not good at deciding which options matter. For a long time it was assumed the valuable part of writing was producing words. AI is good at that. It is not good at knowing which words are worth keeping.

Janna: The more time I spend using AI, the more I am convinced that the future does not belong to the people who can generate the most content the fastest. It belongs to the people who know what is worth saying in the first place. A good writer is going to use AI to get more productive. A weak writer is going to use AI and get a stronger looking version of weak thinking. I want to end with this. AI can give you words, but it can’t give you judgment. Thank you. What questions do we have?

Carrie (26:46): I’m going to come up too, because Janna and I work together a lot. We both are writers and both use AI.

David (26:59): I recently gave a YouTube URL to AI and asked for a summary, and it said no. Is that on the horizon?

Carrie: You can already do that, but not always. It depends on the AI. What you would want to do is make a transcript first, then load the transcript into AI and say summarize this transcript. There are a bunch of transcription apps that will do that. There are also free ones. Just Google free YouTube transcription. You plug the URL in and it gives you a transcription.

Carrie: YouTube will also summarize for you natively now. If you have built agents in Claude that know what you actually want to pull out, I would transcribe and upload the transcript and run that skill. David says it works in Gemini, and I think that is accurate. Another thing I have found is AI can be buggy. My Claude sometimes says I can’t access that Google Drive file, and I am like, yes you can, I connected it. Sometimes it is just trying again. It can be like an inexperienced intern. You have to consistently teach it. For example, this morning my recap said Jason canceled your lunch meeting so you have 11:30 to 1 open. I was like, I’m pretty sure I have something noon to one. AI said, yeah you do. So I taught it: if someone cancels a meeting, do not just tell me I’m open. Check the calendar again. Writing is the same way.

Guest (30:49): How do you handle people who see em dashes as a red flag that you used AI when you are a writer who believes in the power of the em dash?

Janna: My sister saw something I had written and asked if I used AI. I have been using em dashes for a long time. Now that AI is more prevalent, I try to go into my writing and see where maybe I don’t have to use one. I leaned on them more heavily before AI. I have had a freelance client ask me if we need this em dash, does it look more like AI? Chances are people might think that. But there are other tells with AI writing that are stronger. The not this but that. The word honestly. The word quietly. That is a huge one now. Look for the other tells.

Carrie: I think it depends on whether I am writing for marketing or advertising, or something that is going to live longer, or for internal people. If it’s internal, I don’t worry as long as it communicates. In marketing and ads I try not to use them. That includes social media, because I am trying to connect with people and if it turns anybody off, I have lost them. I was originally a semicolon person. When I started writing for advertising, I started using em dashes because semicolons can feel fussy and people look at it like you are bragging. So I switched. Going back to a colon or restructuring or doing two sentences feels natural to me. I can’t believe we live in a world where we talk about em dashes.

Michael (34:04): Should we be using AEO in our prompts?

Janna: I will say give me a version that is optimized for AEO. A lot of times it comes back with something a little too lengthy for an H1, but it is a good starting point.

Pam (35:19): We are looking for FAQs, quick question answers, concise answers at the top. If it is a service page about lawn care, the one or two sentence about what you do needs to be at the top. Don’t hide the lead. Don’t leave your call to action at the very bottom. AI wants to answer quickly, just like everyone else. Format your text so it pulls easily. If you have a lot of prices on your website, give a price range so AI pulls an accurate range and doesn’t make one up.

Carrie: SEO used to be more about using the same words over and over with shallow content. Like every page says lawn care company in Birmingham Alabama for Birmingham Alabama lawns. AEO is more like you don’t have to have it on every page. You just need it somewhere, but the content needs to be deeper. Saying check with us for pricing is not going to work. Spell out your pricing. If someone is in ChatGPT, they may never go to your website. They will say give me things in this budget, and you won’t come up.

Janna: AEO forces you to think from your customer’s perspective. What are they asking? What are they looking up? A lot of times people view their websites as for them, when really it is for their customers.

Guest (38:46): I work in social media marketing and I use a free chat. Do you have a preference on platform?

Janna: I used ChatGPT paid for a long time. We had a Teams account and built custom GPTs. ChatGPT served me well. The paid version goes a little deeper than the free version. Now most of us at Infomedia are using Claude. I started testing Claude alongside paid ChatGPT and found the responses were just a little more in depth. I know people who have success with Gemini. Paid is good but not necessary. It depends on your budget.

Carrie: I have found Claude, and especially Cowork, has been a sea change for writing results. With skills and agents and Cowork, the results are night and day different. I am still not just copy pasting. I do think that is wise. But building a skill that says this is the brand voice, this is my intention, this is the audience, and then applying it to your copy gets a lot better result. You can also silo clients in projects.

Luke (41:40): When you are building a website for clients, how important are the words, and is there data to back that up?

Carrie: Largely AI sees the data from words more easily than anything else. Words are your website in a lot of ways. People interact with your brand through the information Google, Perplexity, Claude or ChatGPT has, and the easiest way for those platforms to get information is through words. If you want this to be effective, words are very important.

Janna: Words are still the biggest part of wayfinding on a website and directing visitors on where to go next. You can have a beautiful website with beautiful video and images, but if there are no words telling visitors about your brand or the in-depth things they are looking for, the website is useless to them and it may affect how your brand is viewed.

Carrie: We are the people who tell you words are important. But they genuinely are. Look at your own analytics. Look for yourself in AI search and see if you are coming up. If you are not, it is probably because the words you want to come up for are not represented on your site.

Carrie (44:30): We could talk about this all day, but we have to wrap up. This will all be available on The Localist podcast in the next couple of weeks. The Alabama Twisters were here today, the most visually interesting guests I’ve had in a long time. Next month we are right back here on the third Thursday. We are going to be talking about digital ads with Matt Robinson from Uptick Marketing. When I have questions about ads, I ask Matt. Thank you to our sponsors for having us, and thank you all for coming today.

Carrie: Thank you so much for listening to this Localist Lab session. If you want tickets to the next event, check out the show notes. The tickets are free and we would love to see you there. And as always, whether you are buying from a local business or running one, remember that what you do makes our community stronger every day.