You need to stand out in a sea of AI content, or you’ll lose credibility and trust
We’re living in a generation where it’s hard to tell what’s real anymore…Actually, that’s not even the main problem. The core problem is that fake is all around us, thanks to Generative AI tools, and it’s now hard to find what’s real and genuine.
How many times this week have you scrolled through your LinkedIn feed, and thought to yourself, Wait a minute, I know that post was entirely written by ChatGPT? Or worse, someone comments under your post and they begin writing an entire thesis that sounds generic, preachy, self-promotional, and overly metaphorical, before ending with hashtags and a bullseye emoji.
The AI Content Syndrome
You’ve likely seen it more times than you can count. The internet is rife with lifeless and robotic content, with creators (even senior-level business leaders) using the same prompts, cliched phrases, and tone so often that they can easily be spotted as purely AI with just a quick glance.
Although AI has helped businesses, creators, and freelance professionals scale faster and produce content more easily, on the flip side, it’s making it harder for us to trust what we see or develop real human connection anymore. And that’s a significant problem, because all relationships are fundamentally built on trust and credibility. If that trust element isn’t there because you’re suspected as being a copycat or you sound too templated and robotic, you will lose stakeholders, customers, potential business, and your income.
To stand out in a sea of boring sameness, you need to use Gen AI differently to everyone else. You need to be able to break through the AI noise and leverage your skills in a way that captures attention for the right reasons, not because your blogs or online posts or pathetically “over-AIed,” but because you’re sincerely delivering value online and are establishing trust.
The Skill That’s More Important Than Gen AI
Last year, Indeed ranked Gen AI as the hottest tech skill of the year because it leads to as much as a 47% salary boost (an AWS study also confirmed this), making it the number one highest-paying tech skill of the year. However, what many people tend to miss is that AI is only as effective as the professional behind it.
The AWS study, which surveyed over 1,300 employers, noted that 73% of respondents agree that they’re “not solely focused on workers with technical skills such as coding. In fact, critical and creative thinking are even more in demand by employers.”
These are usually referred to as soft skills, but are more recently being termed power skills, because they’re the driving force of business and career success.
Therefore, if you’re simply plugging in prompts into ChatGPT and using the output just as it is (perhaps with a few minor tweaks here and there), you’re still giving it away that you’re heavily reliant on AI, and that looks bad on your integrity as a professional and on your business.
The number one skill you need in 2025 is communication. And this makes sense, granted that communication skills were listed as the top skill for the year in LinkedIn’s 2024 skills report. But not just any kind of communication. You need creative communication.
To put it simply, you can’t use Gen AI as a crutch for your lack of communication skills or creative thinking. AI skills are there to act as assistants, to augment your work. You can use it for brainstorming assistance, content ideas, even content structuring and to help you draft an outline or sample draft. But never take it for what it is and run with it. Interweave your human voice so that you stand out as unique and so your content and communication doesn’t sound like everyone else.
Here’s how to practically build creative communication skills while at the same time making your career AI-proof:
1. Define Your Unique Brand Voice
This is your tone, your style, what you stand for, etc. When putting prompts through ChatGPT, give it context by explaining your tone and style of speaking, and inform it that you want all the outputs to sound that way. Give ChatGPT clear guardrails so that it’s deliberately avoiding the same robot-speak everyone else uses.
2. Understand What Your Audience Needs
Get to know your audience. If you’re a freelance writer, content creator, blogger, or marketing professional, who are you writing for? Why? What do they need? What resonates with them? Once you understand this, you can find creative ways to grab their attention so they stop and listen.
3. Tell Personal Stories
Your personal experience is unique. No one else has seen what you’ve seen or been through what you’ve conquered, and even if they have, you most likely have a varied perspective and a different lens on these experiences. So, use your story to your advantage. Share what you did, what worked, what didn’t work, what mistakes you made, even case studies and stories of others who you’ve worked with, etc. This makes your writing more genuine, because AI can only repeat stale advice.
4. Build Your Original Thought First
Get comfortable with having your own ideas first and building on them before using an AI tool to refine or add to them. Take a few minutes to draw your own conclusions and insights. Otherwise you’ll begin to mirror everyone else who creates online.
5. Write Before AI
Every now and then, it’s good to flex your creative thinking and communication skills by writing before using any AI tool to assist. This keeps your communication skills nimble, flexes and trains your brain, and ensures you’re comfortable talking to people in regular conversations online and especially offline, without the aid of Gen AI.
Once you develop creative communication skills, you’ll be a powerful asset in your business as a freelancer, and as an employed worker, you’ll stand out in your job and get more results. Human connection, trust, and rapport-building is what enables relationships to be made with partners and clients, and this leads to new and repeat business, some of which could be extremely high-value contracts and projects.
Creativity and original thought is needed even more than AI skills
This is why the skill of creative communication is undoubtedly the number one skill you need to develop fast in 2025, even before understanding AI.