AI Guides › Creative & Design
Using AI For A First Draft Without Losing Your Own Style
By Nigel Guy · 2 min read
The common fear about using AI for a first draft is that it'll flatten your
voice into something generic, and the common response — avoiding first
drafts entirely — throws away a genuinely useful step. The actual risk is
real, but it's caused by a specific habit, not by using AI for drafting in
general.
The rule: the flattening happens when you describe your style instead of
showing it — feed real examples of your own work in, and a first draft can
stay recognisably yours.
The mechanism
- Paste in something you've actually written before, not a description
of your style. "Match the voice in this" does more work than any amount
of adjectives.
- Ask for a first draft that's deliberately rough, not polished. A
rougher draft leaves more room for your own editing pass to do the actual
voice-work, rather than fighting against an already-finished piece.
- Do a real editing pass yourself, every time. The first draft's job is
to remove the blank-page problem, not to be the final version.
- Notice what you changed in your edit, over several drafts. That
pattern is useful data about what your actual voice needs that the
drafting step tends to miss.
- Keep a running style note of the specific things you keep having to
fix, and feed those back in as explicit instructions next time.
What to skip
Skip publishing a first draft unedited, on anything with your name attached —
this is the actual point where "sounds like AI" complaints come from, not
from having used AI to draft at all. And skip describing your voice in the
abstract when a real writing sample is available to paste in instead.
Guardrails
- A first draft is a starting point, not a finished piece, regardless of
how strong it reads — treat the editing pass as mandatory, not optional
polish.
- If you're writing on behalf of someone else, use their voice samples, not
your own — see "Claude's Tone Settings" for the fuller version of this.
- The goal is removing the blank-page problem, not removing your own
judgement from the piece. If the edit pass feels unnecessary, that's worth
double-checking, not skipping.
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