54: Is Using AI Cheating? (How To Use AI In An Embodied Way)

Ever read a post and just know it was written by AI? 

In this episode, I share a moment on Threads that sparked a big reflection on AI and authenticity in business. I dive into what it really means to use AI in your business without disconnecting from your energy, your voice, and the people you're actually here to serve.

Whether you're using AI to save time (or you want to but don’t like what it spits out), this episode will help you rethink your approach,  and show you how to stay rooted in your presence while using tools that actually support your voice. If you’ve been conflicted or quietly cringing at some of what you’re seeing online, this one’s for you.

💡 What You’ll Learn in This Episode

• Why using AI isn’t cheating (but hiding behind it might be)
• How generic, polished content affects your connection with your audience
• A practical look at how to work with AI without losing your voice

🔑 Key Takeaways

• You can save time and still stay true to yourself
• Real > perfect.  Always
• Your content won't land if you are not in it

🎯 Take Action

To create more space inside yourself to hold the kind of business you really want start with my Impact & Income Capacity Reset. It’s a free audio and worksheet that you can get here ⤵️

✅Get the FREE Embodied Entrepreneur Masterclass :

https://tertiariegler.com/the-embodied-entrepreneur-free-masterclass/

➡️ Get your Impact & Income Capacity Reset and start tapping into the wisdom of your body and grow your business with more ease, without overriding your nervous system.

https://tertiariegler.com/impact-income-capacity-reset/

🧵Follow me on Threads for embodiment tips to navigate business without pushing past your limits.

https://www.threads.com/@tertia_riegler_embodiment

📩 Got questions? DM me

https://www.instagram.com/tertia_riegler_embodiment/

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https://www.buzzsprout.com/2004120

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📌Disclaimer: This podcast is for informational and educational purposes only. It does not constitute therapy, medical advice or business coaching.

Transcript

Tertia [00:00:00]:
Are you cheating when you use AI in your business? That is a question that I sat with myself and I have come to an answer. This is what I'm going to take you through in today's episode. So if you are someone who has been on the fence about using AI, or you have used AI, but you are frustrated and unimpressed by the output that it gives you, then I think you'll find today's episode helpful. Welcome to Beyond Burnout for Driven Women. I'm Tertia and this is where we go from burnout to abundance and we take your nervous system along for the ride. If you are doing all the right things but you are still not feeling the shift, you are in the right place. Here we explore embodiment nervous system work and how to be magnetic without going into overdrive or burning yourself out. I had an experience on Threads recently which is like partial inspiration for this episode. So I love threads. I love it, I love it, I love it. I find it. For me, this is the best social media platform. Threads has a level of intimacy that is missing on some of the other platforms. And who knows, maybe you know, as it grows bigger and more people start using it, that level of intimacy will disappear. But for right now, I find it's still a place where we can go to and really connect with other people and we can share what's on our heart and on our mind and our opinions and it's a place to really find like minded people. And by the way, if you are on threads and we haven't connected yet, I'd love to connect. So I'll leave my handle for you in the show notes. You can go and find it there and let's connect. So what happened was I typed in a keyword and all of these AI generated posts popped up. There were, out of the 10 posts that I scrolled through, probably seven of them were in my opinion completely AI generated. And the tell to me was that it was completely generic. I felt nothing of the person who actually wrote it. There was no, there was no depth to the posts and so many friggin EM dashes. EM dash. If you don't know, it's that little line between two words. But the M dash is a longer line so it's like two little short dashes next to each other. And I swear I've never seen so many EM dashes in my life as you see all of a sudden on all the writing everywhere, every sentence has got an EM dash in and that is big AI towel. So what frustrates me about this is not so much that all of these posts that I saw was AI. What frustrated me is they didn't create any response in me except for frustration and maybe disappointment. There was resonance. So I couldn't find anything to say about these posts unless I said something like, yes, cool, true. Me too. Which are really not, not really much of anything to say, right? It's just filling space. So here's the thing that I believe. If we use AI in a way where it takes over our voice and we hide who we are behind AI generated copy, then that is cheating. Because we are cheating our clients out of truly feeling us, out of truly connecting with us. So there are a lot of reasons why AI is godsend. One of the reasons that just pops into my mind immediately is for someone like me who doesn't speak English or who's whose first language isn't English. As you can tell if your first language isn't English, then it is kind of soothing and comforting to know that there is a tool that can help you speak better English or sound better, right? Or not make terrible grammar mistakes. And of course you able to. When you use AI versus just writing stuff out of your head, you're able to generate a lot more content when you use AI in the right way. And I'm putting that in quotation marks because who knows what the right way is. But if you're using AI in a way that feels aligned and true for you, you can become prolific in terms of creating content. It can save you so much time. But not if you go, listen, give me 10 posts on this topic. And then you take that and you just dump those 10 posts exactly like that into your scheduler. People are discerning. Our clients are discerning. They seeing this, they're reading it, they can feel the energy, all this stuff that AI generates unless you, you train it. All right? And that's a different conversation. And there are lots of creators out there who are teaching how to train AI so that it sounds more like you. And that's not what this episode is about. But by all means, if you haven't yet done any training in terms of how to teach AI to sound more like you, then I can highly recommend you do that. The thing is, AI is a language based model. It has no life to it. There are words, but it doesn't think it's very literal. It doesn't connect the dots it doesn't touch the nuance, it doesn't read between the line. There's absolutely no feeling in the words. There's no passion, there's rhythm, there's cadence, there's em dashes, but there is no life. How can we engage with each other? How can we feel each other's hearts? How can we connect with each other? And here I'm speaking to how can our clients feel us if they are reading AI generated copy? The way that I use AI in my business is, for example, with my podcast. Now, most of my podcasts I create in response. So it's because I see something, I either agree with something or I don't agree with something. I go off on a little tangent. I see something and I want to talk about it. I get an idea from somewhere, I create the podcast and then I put the transcript of that into chat and I get chat to summarize my transcripts, to create the show notes, and then to create the blog post from there. And it could even, I sometimes even ask it to lift specific words and phrases out using my exact words. And I repurpose that and I use that on social media. So I'm not creating something out of nothing. I'm using my own words that I give it to create something. I might even ask it to outline a blog post for me. If I have an idea about a blog post that I want to write, but I don't know what I could potentially else say about this topic, then I ask for an outline. But I'm the one who starts the process. The impulse always comes from me. The problem that I see when we use AI just on its own, and I notice this specifically because I'm into embodiment, I notice that whenever I talk about embodiment or I talk about the nervous system, it defaults to certain terms, it starts talking in softer terms, it starts using these softer words. It's almost like it has these built in triggers that when there are certain keywords like embodiment or burnout or nervous system, it defaults into certain language patterns and it starts, I don't know what to call it. It's almost like it goes all softly, modly, coddling gently, oh, you so fragile, you know, tread carefully. It uses this kind of language and it starts using phrases like you not broken, you're starting over, you're not behind you right where you need to be. And it's, these are hallmarky kind of bumper sticker platitudes that has no depth to them. And if we are only Using that, it cheats our clients out of feeling our presence. And I know it sucks that we live in a world where volume and output and you have to always feed the algorithm, feed things into your marketing channels, feed things into multimedia. It sucks that those things get rewarded. And that's what makes us use things like AI, right, so that we can put out more content into the world. But the thing is, how can you live in a system that is so screwed up? What choices can you make inside this screwed up system so that you can navigate yourself in the system? I was in a workshop this weekend which also partially inspired this, together with my threads experience inspired this episode and by Kelly Diels. And she gave us some really hot tips on how to make AI sound like you. And to me, this is the thing, how we use AI without cheating is we have to give it our ideas, we have to give it our messy jumble of thoughts and we go, this is what I want to say. Now take this and put it into some kind of semblance or order and write something. And then you don't take that first thing on the page that it spits out and you publish that. You refine it by saying, okay, does this sound like me? Would I actually say this out loud? And can I feel myself in these words? Does this feel like me? And I find if I use these three checkpoints, then it helps me stay true to my voice. I'm yearning to connect with real words on social media and to connect with accounts and other content creators that show me who they are, that appreciates that centering our vulnerability and holding ourselves vulnerable while we show up as our true selves is one of the cornerstones that makes our marketing align with our truth. This makes us congruent, right? This is how we honor ourselves. This is how we build body led businesses. And, and yes, it doesn't go as fast as pumping out 20 generic posts out of AI and putting them out into the ethers. But that's not what I'm here for. I'm here for building community. I'm here for building connection. I'm here for building my business in a way that nourishes me and provides a level of support to my clients so that they can learn to nourish themselves. A very first step that you can take to discover how to nourish yourself and bring more of your authentic self is to start creating more capacity, start creating more space inside you to hold the kind of business that you are building for yourself. And that's exactly what you'll be able to do. When you listen to my Impact and Income Capacity Reset, I will link it for you in the Show Notes. It's a free download, a free guided Audio plus worksheet. You do the worksheet first and then you listen to the audio. That is going to help create some more space inside you and release some of these somatic blocks that get in the way of you having the impact you're here to make or making the income that you desire to make. So wrapping us up using AI is definitely not cheating. But if you are bypassing your own voice, your own expression, your own energetic imprint, you are missing the whole point, right? AI can serve us. AI is a tool, but you need to be the source of the creativity and the inspiration and the medicine that you are here to bring to your clients. I'd love to know how this episode landed for you. DM me your take, but write it like you mean it. Don't send me AI responses. I'd love to hear your voice and your words. Thank you so much for tuning in. If you enjoyed this episode, then please do me the biggest favor ever and leave me a review. Leave me a rating and share this episode with your business bestie who's had questions about using AI in her business. I'll catch you in the next one. Bye.