I Built an AI Skill to Sharpen My Taste. Here’s how it works.
A content taste skill that can help sharpen your taste. Free to download.
One of the first meaningful things I built with AI is a content system. I documented some of the system here. And I’d still be the first to say AI will always disappoint if you’re expecting a finished article, social post or tweet.
But I still believe there is real value in AI for content, in its ability to build a profile of your audience, better understand that audience, research ideas, create first drafts, and review your content.
As I work on v2 of my AI brain and AI content system, I wanted to do something different in this post and share a skill from the upgraded version of the content system.
Can AI help you instill taste into the content you create by acting as a coach?
The skill is called content taste. It’s a check-in for content you’re going to publish. A system that asks the two questions most writers skip.
Gate 1: The Share Test.
Would your ideal writer forward this to a colleague with a note that says “you need to read this”?
People share content for exactly five reasons. It made them look smart. It named something they felt but couldn’t articulate. It gave them an unfair advantage. It surprised them. Or it told a story they couldn’t stop thinking about.
Most content fails because it’s trying to be “useful” when it should be targeting “shareable”. Your currency as a writer is shareable.
Gate 2: The Onlyness Test.
Do you have a differentiated perspective? Is your content unique? Do people know it’s yours?
This is where people have gone awry on AI. Their content is perfectly written, word by word, by a series of prompts and intelligent AI models, and all that content is indistinguishable from each other.
What’s unique is your specific opinion, your lived experience, your achievements, what you know.
The skill tests in three ways. Delete the author’s name. Can you still tell who wrote it? Could a competitor republish the same piece next week? Is this built on something only this creator has, or on the same public inputs every model has already seen?
It coaches and provides helpful recommendations.
The skill will provide suggestions on how to improve your content and
What do you believe about this that your smartest peers would argue with?
What did you personally watch happen that contradicts the consensus?
What’s the number, result, or story that only you have?
Who is this for, and who are you willing to be wrong in front of?
Unlike most skills, it doesn’t give you generic recommendations; it attempts to coach you on how to improve your content.
The anti-AI slop patterns
The skill will then attempt to fix all those AI ‘slop’ patterns that have become so common in online content. I should note that these patterns are not ‘slop’; they are great writing patterns; it’s just that AI has saturated them.
How is this giving me taste?
The purpose of this taste is to coach you on how you can develop the right instincts to make your content ‘tasteful’.
The purpose of the skill is to help force a conversation on how you can improve your content. It’s to help you pause and be a little more considerate of what you are posting and why. This is what I use the skill for; these words are as much for me as you.
Would someone actually share this? Could only I have written it? Is there a single line worth screenshotting?
You likely know the answers immediately. But, you rarely stop long enough to ask yourself them.
When something fails, it doesn’t attempt to rewrite your draft with better adjectives. It spars. Acts as a coach, pushing you to bring out your unique taste and inject it into the content.
One quick note. This skill is plugged into my system so auto loads my audience profile and writing style that I covered in this post on how you build. If you don’t have either of those things, it’s ok, I’ve modified the skill so it will still work.
The giveaway
So, as I said, this post is a little different, I wanted to give away one of the skills from the new content system I’ve been building to get a feel if you all think they are useful. Here is the downloadable SKILL.md. Here is the image, you can also just take this and ask AI to create it.
I ran one of my LinkedIn posts through it and this was the result, the spar means i can then go back and forth with the system to pull out things from me that would make the post better. This is the core difference in how it works with what i see a lot of other people posting. It’s still you making the content better, the AI is helping to direct you, acting as a sparring partner.
Feel free to drop me a note on how it works for you. As always, you should adjust to your needs.
I’ll be dropping much more from v2 Second Brain and v2 AI content system in future posts.
Until Then,
Happy AI’fying
Kieran