How to make ChatGPT
sound less like AI

Here is a brief we use to test Keyiku. A two-truck lawn crew in Lincoln, Nebraska. Fifteen years in business. Always on time. Texts a photo when the job is done. Write the homepage headline and the line under it.

First, the same model with a plain prompt. This is the draft it handed back, copied exactly.

Step 1: find the one thing

Before Keyiku writes a word, it plans. Who reads this, and what is on their mind right before they do? For this brief, the plan named a homeowner who wants the lawn handled without keeping track of the people handling it.

Then it looks for the insight, the true thing that is easy to miss. Here it was the photo. A photo of a finished lawn does more than show the work. It closes the loop on a job the homeowner may not be home to see.

That one sentence did more for the final copy than any rule about words. You can do this step yourself in ChatGPT. Ask it who the reader is and what worries them before you ask it to write.

Step 2: three drafts, three moves

Keyiku keeps a library of moves taken from great writing, each with the real wording it came from and a skeleton to follow. For this brief it picked three, and wrote one draft on each.

• Make the benefit something you can picture, the move behind Apple’s "1,000 songs in your pocket": A photo of the finished job on your phone
• Prove it with one checkable detail, the move behind Ogilvy’s Rolls-Royce clock line: Two trucks. Fifteen years of lawn work in Lincoln
• Answer the worry directly: Leave the follow-up to your lawn crew

Step 3: the red pen

All three drafts passed the checker clean. That happens often with a planned draft, because the plan already points away from filler. When a draft does trip it, every flagged line goes to the editor with the reason attached.

Step 4: the editor’s three questions

The editor scores each draft on a handful of questions. Three matter most, and they come from the copywriter Harry Dry. Can you picture it? Could it be proven wrong? Could anyone else say it?

The editor took the photo draft as the base, then pushed it toward the insight from step one. Here is what came back.

Step 5: read it out loud

Machine drafts tend to run every sentence at one length. The writer Gary Provost showed the problem in a passage most copywriters know.

Read your draft aloud. Where it drones, cut one sentence short. Where it stutters, join two. If you want the whole loop done for you, paste the brief into Keyiku. It plans, writes three versions, checks each one and edits the winner in about a minute.