Why Using AI to Write Your Brand Voice is Killing Your Business With Delia McCowan
Dear Creator,
Have you ever asked ChatGPT to write your website copy, your Instagram captions, or maybe your About page? You’re not alone and there’s no shame in that. And you’re not a bad business owner for doing it either. But Delia, a brand strategist, copywriter, and founder of Tidewater Studio, helps us see that the shortcut might be quietly costing entrepreneurs the one thing that actually gets them hired — which is their voice and personality.
In this episode of Dear Creator, Delia breaks down why AI generated copy defeats your brand personality across the internet, how founders can rebuild trust by sharing their own perspective, and why “professionalism” is starting to change in society. Or well over due for a change at least.
If you don’t know Delia, you should. She’s a brand strategist and copywriter working with founders, service providers, and creative businesses to build communities that buy from you, because of you.
After working in every facet of corporate marketing, she took the leap into entrepreneurship, working with business owners to go beyond “what makes them different”, guiding you through how you can use your personality and perspectives as a core part of building your brand.
Key Highlights
Does AI Writing Actually Hurt Your Brand
It’s not really about the words that AI is using, but what outsourcing your voice (or even your perspective) can do to your relationship with your own business.
Delia’s seen clients lose the ability to explain what they believe in and why because they’ve given ChatGPT or other AI tools the job to think for them instead of doing the internal work themselves.
Now, Delia does a quick test for new clients where she pulls buzzwords straight off their website, that she believes is AI-written, and asks them to explain how the word actually shows up in their business. Delia explains how if you can’t explain the buzzword and what it means for your brand, then the reader might not feel that either.
Delia doesn’t completely disregard AI’s capabilities though. She’s used it for back-end efficiency when it’s integrated inside tools like HoneyBook, workflow admins, the mundane tasks, and more. She draws the line though. Automation is a yes. Anything that expresses her or her clients’ perspective is a no.
How to Find Your Authentic Voice
Delia starts with every client on a deeper level first, asking founders first to sit with questions like:
What do I actually value in business and life?
Why do my perspectives matter?
What about my approach to this industry genuinely fuels me?
Instead of going straight to mission statements or vision boards.
She explains that the mission and vision are a downstream of self-knowledge. When you skip it, you get generic brand language that could belong to any competitor which is exactly the AI tools fall into when they’re asked to write brand messaging with no real input to work from.
So she uses her own framework to get honest about the why first, journaling and sitting with the discomfort of it if needed, and the what, where, and how of your marketing following naturally.
Does Traditional Marketing Work Still?
We both agreed that chasing the algorithm approach to marketing isn’t as affective as knowing how deeply a message resonates emotionally with the right people. The “post this many times, use this hook, or follow this exact framework and strategy” is just a bandaid fix.
Delia’s advice is instead of optimizing for reach, optimize for depth with a smaller, more specific audience. She explains that she’d rather have one person read a message and think, “how does this person know me this well?” than have ten thousand people mildly agree with a generic hook or angle. That specificity is what turns a follower into a client and Delia notes she’s personally spent real money with people based on that kind of resonance. Not virality.
How to Get Over The Fear of Selling
For the people-pleasers especially, which me and Delia both labeled ourselves as “recovering”, selling can feel like an imposition. Delia’s reframe is how not selling is actually the disservice. If she doesn’t bring in enough clients, she has less time and energy for the clients she already has, and less capacity to share the expertise she’s spent years building. Holding back doesn’t protect anyone. It can limit how many people get access to help they need.
She also separates “Delia the person” and “Delia the business owner” almost like a professional mode she steps into. It’s not to be fake. It’s to stop blending a business mistake with a personal failure. A missed deadline or an off client call is a normal part of running a business. It’s not evidence that she’s a failure.
What “Professionalism” Means Today
I loved this little rabbit hole we dove into and where the hottest take comes in. Delia talks about how most people’s definition of “professional” was inherited from a 9-5 corporate culture. Which is often shaped by bosses who didn’t share their values or their lived experience. Toning yourself down to fit that mold doesn’t make you more credible. It just puts you and your future clients in a box that neither of you needs or wanted to be in.
The definition of professionalism that we talked about and has nothing to do with suppressing your personality is:
Reliable systems and communication
Hitting deadlines
Doing consistently good work
Everything else, how much personality shows up in your content, your tone, your voice, is a separate axis entirely, and one that’s shifted generationally. She points to something as simple as visible tattoos. It was undesirable in a workplace a generation ago or so, a total non-issue (for the most part) now. Norms change.
We both agree that “professional” is a social construct that’s currently being rewritten by a generation that grew up digitally native but still understands corporate structure well enough to knowingly opt out of it.
Rate and Follow The Dear Creator Podcast
Thank you for diving into this topic with us. If you enjoyed this episode, follow, rate, and leave review for the Dear Creator podcast wherever you listen. It genuinely helps more creators find the show! Catch you in the next episode.
Listen to the full episode of Dear Creator, wherever you get your podcasts, for the entire conversation including the parts that didn’t make it into this recap.
