How I Write with AI
I use AI to create a lot of writing. I’ve found that the more tedious aspects of running Responsive Conference, like drafting 30+ session descriptions or speaker bios, is much faster than ever before. It is easy to upload a recorded curation call with a speaker to an instance of Claude I’ve trained on copy about Responsive Conference, and ask it to use that conversation to generate suggested session titles and descriptions.
I do something very similar for everything I’ve been selling on Facebook Marketplace and Craigslist. Here’s a prompt I've given to Claude to help me sell things on Marketplace.
You are an expert Facebook Marketplace seller specializing in furniture, home goods, professional equipment, electronics, photography/video gear, appliances, tools, and household items. I will upload one or more photos of an item. Your job is to help me sell it.
For every item:
- Identify the item as specifically as possible.
- Estimate the original retail price if recognizable.
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Estimate a realistic Facebook Marketplace selling price based on:
- Condition shown in photos
- Brand recognition
- Demand
- Typical depreciation
- Ease of transport
- Local pickup market dynamics
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Recommend:
- List Price
- Expected Sale Price
- Quick Sale Price
- Suggest the best Facebook Marketplace category.
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Suggest an optimized title that:
- Includes important search keywords
- Includes brand names when valuable
- Sounds natural rather than spammy
- Write a complete Facebook Marketplace description.
The content I get back from projects like these is, of course, AI-generated, so I do edit this content thoroughly. The difference is that this writing isn’t supposed to be in my voice. This is a Craigslist advertisement, or the brand voice of Responsive; it isn’t supposed to be coming from Robin, directly.
Writing Manually
By contrast, this newsletter or an email from me is mine alone. I don't want an LLM to draft the original copy because the entire point is that I want it to be from me, personally. That's the point of the writing!
Everything that I write in an email, or publish in this newsletter is directly from me. But even when writing this newsletter I use LLMs in a very limited way. For most of my life I've struggled to catch grammatical mistakes and typos, so I ask an LLM to give me a bullet point list of grammatical mistakes and typos. The important caveat: I tell it to never re-write for me.
Read and Write More
I hear a lot of concerns (and share much of it) about how cognitive skills are quickly becoming atrophied in the age of AI. It is so easy to read an AI-generated book summary, instead of the book itself, or to generate a copy and call it your own. I believe that traditional skills – like reading physical books and typing words yourself – matter more because they are less common.
I have a long history of partially reading a book and then getting distracted by a different book before I finish the first one. Lately, I've been forcing myself to finish one book before starting the next, and even reading multiple books on the same subject before moving into something different.
One way to get ahead over the next decade is to practice timeless skills like reading and writing. That they are hard to do is the point.
10 Dos and Don’t of Writing with AI
- Do use LLMs to edit your own writing – to catch grammatical mistakes and typos.
- Don't let AI determine your voice.
- Do use LLMs as a brainstorming companion.
- Don't use LLMs to do your thinking for you.
- Do use LLMs to generate copy that isn't supposed to be in your voice (brand copy, listings, descriptions).
- Don't trust that instance blindly — verify facts and figures every time.
- Do train a dedicated instance for a repeatable, well-defined task (like the Marketplace listing generator).
- Don't use LLMs to write original content that's supposed to come from you.
- Do keep reading physical books and finishing them, even when it's hard — that's the differentiator.
- Don't substitute AI fluency for rarer skills of reading and writing yourself.
3 Things I’ve Loved This Week
Book I've Loved
I've written before about Michel Thomas, the polyglot who taught languages to executives and inner-city kids. But I'd never dug into his history. Born a Polish Jew in the years after World War I, he lived an absolutely incredible life. He escaped concentration camps, joined the French resistance, and then after the war became a US counter-intelligence officer, impersonated SS officers in order to arrest them, and organized gatherings of Germans and Allies, despite the horrors he'd witnessed and anti-fraternization laws of the time. He's deceased, but you can get a taste of him through his language teachings.
New Favorite X Account
I try to keep off of X as much as possible, but this account is a bright new light on the Internet. Instead of just showing cool pictures, each post shares a detailed account about something fun in the natural world that impacts each of our lives. Like, did you know that 80% of honey bees are transported across the United States each year to pollinate almond trees?
What I'm Listening To
Don't read this if you're sick of politics, but it's a fascinating look inside rooms where decisions actually got made. Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan are veteran reporters covering Trump, and conducted over a thousand interviews to tell the comprehensive story of the first year of Donald Trump's presidency.
Want more?
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A decade ago, the Responsive manifesto warned that the rate of change was accelerating, and the future would become harder to predict.
That future is here.
Established in 2016, Responsive Conference brings together 275 CHROs, CPOs, founders, and executives for an immersive two-day experience about work.
The conference is built for leaders who want new ideas, tools, and a community that understands what it's actually like to lead amidst uncertainty.
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Every company has a story. Most struggle to tell it clearly.
Zander Media is the strategy-first production company that closes that gap.
If your story deserves to be heard, let's make sure it is.
www.zandermedia.com
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Until next week,
Robin
