How to Use AI to Rewrite Your About Page So It Sounds Like You

1. Your About page is not a résumé

The first mistake people make is feeding the AI their CV and asking it to “make it sound good.” What comes back is a timeline in paragraph form: graduated here, worked there, skilled in everything. That’s a LinkedIn profile, not an About page.

An About page has one job: answer the reader’s real question, which is “why should I trust this person?” Trust doesn’t come from a list of jobs. It comes from a point of view — what you believe about your work, what you’ve actually done, and what you’re like to work with. Before you prompt anything, decide what that point of view is. One sentence is enough. Mine is something like: “I write practical guides because most writing advice is vague and I got tired of it.”

If you can’t write that sentence yet, don’t open the AI tool. Figure it out first. Everything else is decoration.

2. Gather the raw material before you prompt

AI can’t invent your story, and it shouldn’t try. Before I touch a tool, I spend fifteen minutes writing down the raw material in a plain document — no sentences, just fragments:

• The moment I actually started doing this work (not the polished version — the real one)
• Three things I’ve done that I’m genuinely proud of, with numbers where I have them
• The work I turn down, and why
• One opinion I hold that some people in my field would argue with
• What a good client or reader has actually said about working with me — their words, not mine

That last one matters more than the rest. A single real quote beats three paragraphs of self-praise. If you don’t have one, ask a past client or colleague for two sentences. It takes one email.

This raw material is the page. The AI’s job is to shape it, not to supply it. If you skip this step, the tool fills the gaps with filler, and filler is exactly what makes About pages sound like everyone else’s.

3. Write the ugly version yourself first

I know — the whole point of using AI was to avoid writing it yourself. But hear me out: the ugly version only needs to be ten minutes of typing, and it changes everything.

Write three short paragraphs in your own words, badly. “I started writing guides in 2019 because I kept Googling the same editing questions and finding answers that didn’t help. I’ve edited hundreds of drafts since then. I care more about a clear sentence than a clever one.” It doesn’t need to be good. It needs to be yours.

Then give that draft to the AI and ask it to tighten it — not rewrite it. The difference matters. “Tighten this” keeps your sentences, your order, your opinions. “Rewrite this” invites the tool to replace all three with its own defaults. When the AI has your actual words to work from, the result keeps your voice. When it has only a prompt, the result keeps the internet’s voice.

4. Give the AI your voice, not just your job title

A prompt like “write an About page for a freelance writer” will produce the most average freelance writer who ever lived. The fix is to give the tool the same voice material you’d give a human editor:

• Two or three paragraphs you’ve written that you actually like — a blog post, an email, a caption
• Three words that describe how you want to sound (mine: plain, opinionated, practical)
• Three words that describe how you never want to sound (mine: corporate, breathless, humble-braggy)
• One sentence you’d never say about yourself — the AI needs to know what to avoid as much as what to aim for

Paste those into the prompt alongside your raw material. It sounds like extra work, and it is — about five minutes of it. But it’s the difference between an About page that could belong to anyone and one that could only belong to you.

5. Cut the corporate filler

AI About pages lean on the same set of empty phrases, and readers have learned to glaze over them. When I see them in a draft, I delete them and replace them with something specific:

• “Passionate about writing” → what you actually do on a Tuesday afternoon
• “Dedicated to excellence” → the standard you hold yourself to, stated plainly
• “A wealth of experience” → the number of years, or the number of projects
• “Helping clients achieve their goals” → one real result for one real person
• “In today’s fast-paced digital landscape” → delete the whole sentence; it says nothing

None of these phrases are lies. They’re just fog. And an About page is the worst place for fog, because the reader is there specifically to work out who you are. Every sentence that could describe a thousand other people is a sentence that tells them nothing about you.

6. Run the friend test

Here’s my final check before anything goes live: read the page out loud and ask yourself, “Would a friend recognise this as me?” Not “does it sound professional” — “does it sound like me?”

If a sentence makes you cringe slightly, that’s useful information. It usually means the AI wrote something you’d never say. Rewrite that sentence the way you’d say it to someone at a coffee shop. If the whole page passes the test, you’re done. If it doesn’t, the fix is almost never a better prompt — it’s more of your own material in the draft.

One more thing: update the page when your work changes. An About page that still describes who you were three years ago is worse than a short one. I re-read mine every six months and cut whatever no longer fits. It’s a living page, not a plaque.

The honest truth

AI hasn’t made About pages worse — it has just made it faster to produce the kind that were always useless: polished, generic, and forgettable. The pages readers actually remember were never about the writing. They were about the person: what they believe, what they’ve done, and what they’re like to work with.

Use AI for what it’s good at: tightening your sentences, fixing the structure, catching the typos. Keep the rest for yourself — the opinions, the specifics, the sentence only you would write. That’s the part no tool can generate, and it’s the only part that makes an About page worth reading.

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