Don’t let AI kill your personal brand 🛡️
Everyone sounds like AI. Make your voice unpromptable... with AI
I’ve spoken with dozens of founders about how building a personal brand has fuelled their growth, sales, and even hiring. It’s become a real catalyst for founders, but it’s not all upside. When your business becomes your personal brand, you can get trapped. (You can read more about that here.)
But there’s a new problem with personal branding. On LinkedIn and every other platform, founders are starting to sound exactly the same. AI has made it easier to churn out content, and it’s also making everything feel flat, generic, and packed with the same recycled platitudes. And isn’t the whole point of a personal brand to stand out, not blend in?
AI isn’t the enemy. The real threat is handing over your distinctiveness without realising it. That’s why, for this special Insights feature, I asked James Presbitero to share his best advice on using AI to stand out and build a personal brand that can’t be mimicked by a prompt.
James knows this world inside out. He’s a content strategist, ghostwriter for more than a dozen international clients, and the creator behind Write10x. James has helped thousands of professionals write faster, better, and more human with the help of AI, without losing what makes them unique.
Read on for James’s playbook on how to become unpromptable, with AI as your ally, not your replacement. 👇🏻
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Build an AI-augmented personal brand the right way
There’s a strange phenomenon happening on LinkedIn and Twitter right now.
You scroll through your feed and read a founder’s post. It sounds… okay. Maybe even insightful. Then you scroll more, and you read another one. It still sounds ... okay. Exactly like the last post you came across.
It doesn’t feel like a different, mission-focused founder or leader. It feels like one meta-identity, a ChatGPT-flavoured hive mind that reads top-performing posts, stitches them together, and then churns the result out in an assembly line.
Founder brands are becoming indistinguishable from AI writing, to their great detriment.
This is the unintended consequence of AI content tools becoming mainstream. What started as a way to write faster has turned into a fast track to a synthetic, utterly bland online presence. And there's a big harm here.
People hate AI content
Founders who care about originality and connection are right to feel uneasy. Because the truth is, when founder brands appear AI-generated, people are turned off.
Here’s what the data says:
Negative bias against perceived AI content. Multiple studies confirm that people rate content more negatively if they believe it was made by AI, even when it was actually created by a human. The bias is perception-driven.
Trust and enjoyment decrease. When participants are told that a story, article, or headline is AI-generated, they report lower trust, engagement, and satisfaction, even when the content is factually accurate or high quality.
Perception overrides reality. In most studies, simply labeling human-written content as "AI-generated" leads to a drop in perceived accuracy, trustworthiness, and enjoyment. The label triggers skepticism and sometimes outright rejection.
So yes, founders who feel uneasy are right. The stakes are higher than just style. The wrong use of AI can actively undermine trust, reduce engagement, and repel the very people you're trying to attract.
But… you know that AI is still a very valuable tool
And here lies the paradox: while bad AI use can be catastrophic to your brand, not using AI at all might be just as harmful.
Why? Because AI today is one of the most powerful forms of leverage available to founders and leaders. It’s not just about marketing. AI helps your personal brand with clarity, speed, and reach.
With the right approach, AI can help you:
Test and shape ideas before sharing them publicly
Systemise and structure your knowledge more clearly
Multiply your message across channels without fragmenting your voice
With the right approach, AI is like hiring an always-on co-founder for your content, except it’s scalable, affordable, and always available.
Founders who learn to wield this correctly gain a serious advantage. Not just in output, but in insight. And this clarity and speed are differentiators.
So if misused AI erodes trust, but ignoring AI slows you down, what’s the middle ground? That’s what we’re here to discuss.
Use AI to become unpromptable
Let’s get something straight: AI isn’t the problem. Misusing AI is.
The solution isn’t to abandon AI altogether. Nor is it to hand over every aspect of your personal branding to AI. Rather, it’s to use it mindfully. To augment what makes you human, to augment your soul, not replace it.
I call this concept Unpromptability.
An unpromptable brand is one that prompts can’t mimic. It’s not just your tone or sentence structure. It’s your mission, your lived experience, your weird opinions and quirks, and how you show up for your community and audience: all these fuse into something unique that AI can’t replicate.
To build this kind of brand, you need to shift from AI-generated to AI-augmented. Here’s how:
1️⃣ Get clear on your identity
Before you touch a tool, you need clarity. Who are you? What do you stand for? Why do you do what you do?
Your identity isn’t just a tagline or mission statement. It’s the lived reality behind your choices. The way you speak, the stories you repeat, and the values that anchor your decisions.
Without this clarity, anything you create, human or AI-assisted, will lack coherence and resonance. That’s why your identity is the single most important input you can feed into your brand-building system.
To uncover yours:
Write a “Why I exist” paragraph in plain language
List 3 beliefs you hold that contradict popular opinion
Pinpoint the moment that made you commit to your mission, and more
All of this forms the core signal that should echo through your content.
Alternatively, you can get clear on this through a method I call the Ikigai brainstorming. Here, you talk to AI about all these things, and it will help you brainstorm and compile all the information you need to form your identity layer.
2️⃣ Build your authentic AI assistant
Once you’ve nailed down your identity, the next step is to translate it into a working assistant.
Not a generic AI tool, but a custom mirror of your voice and values. Off-the-shelf AI sounds like everyone else. But with intentional training and material, your assistant can think and write almost exactly like you would.
I have a process for this, and four core information documents to build your authentic AI assistant. I call them the Four Foundations:
Personal profile. This profile captures who you are as a human being. It’s the emotional and philosophical core of your brand. When your AI assistant understands this, it knows what drives your decisions, what stories resonate, and what tone to use in sensitive moments.
Business profile. This means your mission, audience, positioning, and so on. This clarifies what you do, who you serve, and where you stand in the market. It ensures your AI reflects your brand’s strategic message, not just your personality, but your value to others.
Writing profile. This is the stylistic fingerprint. It’s how your content sounds and feels. Your writing profile guides AI in replicating your rhythm, humour, analogies, and structural preferences.
Writing system guideline. This outlines how you go from idea to published post. It includes preferred frameworks, ideation methods, editing flow, and publishing cadence. This helps your assistant co-create within your actual workflow, not just generate copy in a vacuum.
With this information, your assistant becomes an amplifier, not a replacement. It helps you write like you, on your best day, consistently.
The process of building this kind of assistant can feel overwhelming — after all, you’re front-loading your entire identity into four documents.
You can make the process massively easier with the proper workflow and prompts, though. I made a distilled system for creating your Four Foundations and training your AI to become a powerful, personal writing ally without the guesswork or generic outputs.
3️⃣ Reclaim your time and amplify relationships
The true power of AI is in time reclamation. The time you save from structuring and drafting can be spent where the real value lives: in the comments, in DMs, in collaboration.
What this looks like in practice:
Prioritise listening over posting. Scale the intimacy, not the frequency.
Focus on the top 5% of your audience who bring energy and alignment
Create recurring rituals that deepen trust (weekly AMA posts, feedback loops)
Use AI to draft, so you can spend your energy replying to high-value responses
Turn long-form insights into 1:1 connection starters or personalised voice notes
Because at the end of the day, the goal of a founder brand isn’t just content, but connection. The content is the entry point, and the relationship is the payoff.
The beauty of authentic AI is that it can make this so much easier. You can show up more often, more consistently, and with greater clarity. But only if you build it the right way: from your core outward.
Founders who get this will stop chasing algorithms and start attracting real allies. That’s the kind of brand that lasts.
4️⃣ Stay real while scaling faster
When you do this right, the benefits are immediate and powerful.
In the short term:
You post more consistently, without creative burnout.
You speak more clearly about your vision and values.
You free up energy to focus on engagement, not just creation.
In the long term:
You cultivate trust in a sea of noise.
You build a brand that grows with you, and still sounds like you.
You become magnetic to the right people: clients, investors, collaborators.
AI isn’t going away, and neither is the pressure to build a visible, compelling brand.
But the founders who win won’t be the ones who sound the smartest. They’ll be the ones who sound the most like themselves, at scale.
The future of branding isn’t human vs. machine.
It’s human augmented by technology, just as tech was always meant to do. Intentional and integrated. Unpromptable.
Founders who ignore this will become invisible, outpaced by those who build unpromptable brands from the start.
Want more mindful AI strategy like this? Subscribe to Write10x by James Presbitero and get The Active Prompt Vault (a living collection of 20+ powerful writing and content marketing prompts) for free.
More on personal branding from Millennial Masters:
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Loved working on this for your audience, Daniel. It's a more important topic than ever!
The idea of becoming unpromptable really hits home. AI should amplify our voice, not replace it. Liked the focus on intentionality, identity, and connection.