Why your AI sounds like the creature from Swamp Thing

Alec Holland was just an ordinary scientist trying to solve world hunger by developing a plant growth serum hidden away inside his secret lab in the middle of a Louisiana swamp.

Well someone else wanted it for nefarious reasons and tried to blow up him and his lab.

But instead of dying, laying there mangled in a swamp, his consciousness merged with the plant life around him as a result of the way the chemicals inside his serum melded with his rapidly expiring body and the natural world.

The end result is that our do-gooding scientist survives… but looks terrifying.

Like a giant walking compost pile.

And if you’ve never read the comics or seen the movie, you might assume that the Swamp Thing is some type of evil monster. Well he’s not, he’s just Alec Holland, an intelligent and empathetic person trying to help people out a little bit.

But none of that comes across when he opens his mouth.

Every word he speaks sounds like it’s being dragged through the mud. Slow, awkward, not quite human enough to connect. His intentions are good, but his delivery is… monstrous.

Hence the name Swamp Thing.

And I couldn't help but think…

That's exactly what it sounds like when most people try to use AI to write.

You sit down, enter a prompt, and out comes something that sounds like… the average of the internet. So you get more specific, you upload a few PDFs of your writing, your client avatars, your ideas. It get’s a little better.

But every time you try to create something, you’re starting from scratch.

What was that prompt again? What documents do I need? How do I generate something usable again?

That’s the problem with AI chatbots or even custom GPTs, they don’t know a thing about you. They don’t know your stories. They don’t know your frameworks. They don’t have any clue about the 300 emails you’ve already written. And even if they did, they would just start regurgitating the things you’ve already said in a slightly new and illogical order.

They would sound like the Swamp Thing.

Well meaning, intelligent even, but lumbering through your ideas like a giant compost pile that somehow got ahold of your LinkedIn account.

Which is why most people spend more time battling or avoiding AI in their day-to-day work rather than using it to increase the quality and creativity of their output to the point where it almost feels unfair. And the reason all this happens is because AI is primarily trained on everyone else in the whole entire world except you.

And that’s the problem. Your AI doesn't know you… yet. Which is why it doesn’t work for you.

So the solution is to just give AI access to everything you do. Your stories, your content, your emails, your transcripts, and then organize it in such a way that it finds the right things at the right times and produces them precisely when you need them.

So here’s what I did about that… (i.e. how to de-swamp-thing your AI robots):

Three years ago, I started building an organization system inside Notion. It makes writing easier. It does a lot of the organizing for you. You just write your content like normal… some Threads, an email, a sales page, even the educational content you share inside your offers, and as you do that, it’s understanding of your world grows.

Every day you use it, it grows smarter and stronger.

And if you're already using Notion, you're already most of the way there. You won’t have to learn a new tool or anything, you can just make better use of what you’ve already got. Then, instead of lumbering through your ideas like something that crawled out of a Louisiana swamp, your AI can help make you sound more like you.

Anyway, I threatened to put together a writing sprint that mixes the copywriting and conversion side of things with the automation power of building in Notion, and here’s a chance to express your interest.

If enough people yodel in response, I’ll put it together and we’ll run it inside the Skool community.

What say you? — “YODEL-AY-EE-OOOO” ??? — Say it back and we’ll get started soon.

Talk soon,

Kevin Hood