What's the actual step-by-step process to write a blog post with AI without it sounding generic?

You don't ask the AI to write the whole post at once — you break it into five distinct steps and feed it your own research and opinions at each stage, which prevents the generic, surface-level content that comes from one-shot prompting. Here's the process I use. Step one: dump everything you know into a messy brain dump. Bullet points, half-formed thoughts, anecdotes, data points you remember. Don't organize it. Just get it out. Step two: ask the AI to organize that brain dump into a logical outline. Tell it 'don't add anything new, just structure what I gave you.' This keeps your voice and knowledge at the center. Step three: for each section of the outline, write a rough draft yourself. It can be terrible. Three bullet points is fine. The point is you're providing the substance. Step four: ask the AI to expand each rough section into proper paragraphs, but instruct it to 'preserve all original facts, opinions, and examples — only improve clarity and flow.' Step five: read the whole thing out loud. Your ear will catch robotic phrasing that your eyes skip over. Mark those spots and rewrite them yourself, or ask the AI for three alternative phrasings and pick the one that sounds most like you. A concrete example: I once wrote a post comparing AI writing tools. My brain dump included a story about a client who hated Jasper's tone. That story made it into the final post because I put it in the brain dump. If I'd just asked the AI to 'write a comparison post,' that personal anecdote never would have appeared. The AI would have given me a feature table and some bland pros and cons. The magic isn't in the prompt. It's in the process. For a deeper dive, see our guide on building an AI content creation workflow. **Related**: How many prompts does it take to write a good blog post with AI? | Should I use different AI tools for outlining vs. writing?