بسم الله الرحمن الرحيم

Your Voice, Amplified

Using AI wisely to improve the quality and reach of your content

Dr M Waleed Kadous
GMC · 12 July 2026

Scan This Now

walee.dk/gmc26

  • These slides
  • A file for your AI — more later

Who I Am

  • I speak and build AI and Islam
  • askansari.ai — an Islamic AI assistant
  • AI for Imams course: presented 4× in the last year, over 200 graduates
  • Interviews / joint articles with:
    • OnePath
    • Thinking Muslim
    • Productive Muslim

Today's Path

  1. Four timeless principles for creating great content with AI
  2. One project, start to finish — niyyah → multiple content assets

Part 1

Four Timeless Principles

Different Content, Same Skills

  • Everybody here makes different content
  • Mine: interviews, presentations, training — now moving into short form
  • Today: general skills — they transfer

The Tools I Use

  • I'll name particular tools — that is not an endorsement
  • Claude Code — the most powerful AI engine today, not just for code. Learning curve. Or: claude.ai, gemini.google.com (free tiers), NotebookLM
  • Claude models for writing
  • Descript — video editing for non-professionals
  • ElevenLabs — dubbing and voices
  • Marp — slides from markdown

Principle 1

Understand what AI is for — and what it is not for

What You Bring

  • The core message
  • Your experience — you've done what no AI can
  • Your understanding of your audience

Begin with the End in Mind (Niyyah) — The Core Message

  • How do you want people to feel differently after seeing your content?
  • How do you want people to think differently?
  • How do you want people to behave differently afterwards?

What AI Brings

  • Ideas — and a sounding board for yours
  • A research tool
  • A great tool for amplifying your voice — audiences, formats, media, languages

What AI Should Not Bring

  • AI cannot have niyyah — trusting it with the goal, with the message, is disastrous
  • "Give me 10 ideas for videos to increase my views" — the niyyah is broken from the beginning
  • Turning 2 bullets into 3 pages · deciding the core message · tailoring into spam

AI is not accountable. You are.

Use AI more to raise the bar, less to save you time.

Principle 2

Don't just build a car — build the factory for making cars

Don't Just Build a Car

  • You're not making one piece of content — you're building the system for making content
  • In the case of AI, the factory is the memory
  • Then when you ask for help, the AI is not starting from scratch every time

What Does "Memory" Mean? Files.

  • For me: a local directory full of markdown files
  • For you it might be a shared Google Drive, or a Notion
  • The point: something that allows you to rebuild

What It Looks Like

my-content/
├── style-guide.md        ← how I write
├── rising-to-the-challenge/
│   ├── heart.md          ← the call to action
│   ├── braindump.md      ← everything in my words
│   ├── outline.md        ← the structure
│   ├── research/         ← cited, separate
│   └── slides.md         ← the output
  • Individual documents — each holds one body of information
  • Teach your AI to read them

What Is Markdown?

  • Plain text with simple marks: # heading · - bullet · **bold**
  • Humans can read it; AI reads it perfectly
  • It can be converted into any format — docx, HTML, PDF, even a script for a video you feed into a tool

This presentation started as an md file.

What Goes in the Memory

  • Files with your style — kept current by your corrections
  • Your past presentations

When It Gets It Wrong

  • AI is a tool — it won't get it right the first time. You keep tuning and teaching
  • Every mistake: "remember not to make that mistake again"
  • Documents too wordy? Tell it it's too wordy

The Style Loop

  • It drafts → I edit heavily — I review every word
  • Save its version and my version: "update your understanding of my style based on these edits"
  • The system gets more me over time

Principle 3

Expand the box that AI works in

AI Can Teach You

  • Not sure how to do something? Ask AI — it will tell you

Teach It Skills

  • Want your AI to do something different? Tell it — like follow this presentation's system
  • A skill is a file that teaches your AI when and how to use a tool
  • You don't program it — you describe it

Connect the Skills

  • Skills combine into pipelines: transcript → soundbites → dubs
  • The pipeline becomes part of your factory

It Can Even Write Code for You

  • Your factory needs a new tool? Ask AI to write it
  • From mine: the script that publishes to Medium, the pipeline that builds these slides, the preprocessor that renders charts
  • You don't need to be a programmer — describe what you want

Amplify Your Voice

  • Tailoring for different audiences
  • Multimodal: transcript → soundbites → dubs

Where AI Video Is Today

  • Super powerful with words — getting better with video
  • Video is still improving — in its infancy
  • Video creation takes a lot more iteration

Principle 4

Always ask for the receipts

Receipts

  • Research comes back with citations — for everything
  • What it can't verify gets labeled as unverified, not smoothed over

Research Lives in Its Own File

  • One document — a source of reference — that you borrow from
  • One artifact, many assets — it becomes part of the memory
  • Paste research straight into your content and you lose its provenance

Adversarial Review

  • Claude produces the report → Gemini verifies it
  • Stronger: 3 reports — Gemini, Codex, Claude — then a fused report

For Islamic Content

  • General AIs fabricate references — a made-up hadith is existential, not embarrassing
  • Use AIs grounded in trusted Islamic sources — they retrieve from real texts instead of inventing
  • Every ayah and hadith still gets checked before delivery — AI finds; it doesn't vouch

A Range of Islamic Tools

  • askansari.ai · usul.ai · aifiqh.com · theogrid.ai · islamify.ai
  • New: benchmarks measure how accurate they are — IslamicMMLU, IslamicLegalBench
  • Ansari is a skill — teach it to your AI system: github.com/ansari-project/ansari-skill (also in the for-your-AI file)

Part 2

One Project, Start to Finish

A presentation I gave in Canada — and everywhere it went

s.iaser.ai/rise — the original article

Before Day One

  • The factory already existed — I'd used it for other presentations
  • Style guide: AI scanned my articles
  • It drafted; I rewrote; "extract my style from those changes"

Principle 2 (build the factory) — and its improvement loop.

My Style Guide (excerpt)

## Writing Style Preferences
- Conversational yet authoritative tone
- Mix short, punchy sentences with more detailed explanations
- First-person perspective ("I've seen", "I decided")
- Avoid hyperbole; prefer measured claims with specific examples

## Prose-level AI tells — avoid these
- Em-dash parentheticals — the single most reliable AI tell
- "Not X. Not Y. Not Z." parallel-fragment lists
- Pseudo-profound closing lines
- When in doubt: read it aloud. If it sounds like a TED Talk,
  it's wrong. If it sounds like me talking to a friend, it's right.

First: What Is the Intention?

How did I want people to feel, think, behave?

  • Grasp how big this change is
  • What it means — Ummah and individual
  • Both naive poles rejected: full embrace, full disconnect

Principle 1 (understand what AI is for): the top of the hierarchy — 100% you.

The Seed: 6 Bullet Points

As an Ummah:

  • Embrace the technology with hikmah
  • Ensure we have sovereignty
  • Enjoin good and prohibit evil using it

As individuals:

  • Learn how to use the technology
  • Protect our ra'iyyah from the adverse effects
  • Some of the surplus serves Allah

Then: The Braindump File

  • The intention goes in a file: heart.md
  • Then braindump.md — my ideas, everything, in my words
  • So far, almost zero AI — by design

Principle 1 (understand what AI is for) — the top of the hierarchy, in your own words.

The First Time I Use AI

  • After heart.md and braindump.md — now AI enters
  • We start to think about how to structure the presentation
  • The goal: a new file — outline.md

Working Out the Structure

  • Back and forth on outline.md over 8 times — even changing it a lot
  • 6 bullets → outline → 5 parts × 3 beats
  • AI suggested; I reviewed every version — and I decided

Principle 1 (understand what AI is for): moving down the hierarchy — it suggests, you decide.

Where AI Starts to Help

Shaping outline.md means asking: how do we convince people of the beliefs? How do we get more specific about the actions?

  • "Are there Qur'anic verses that can help make the point?"
  • "If I want to show people that AI will impact their lives — what data is there?"
  • "Are there visuals that can help with this?"

And it starts by reading my own files — it went through my past decks and built a menu of what I'd already said.

Research for the Talk

  • Research in its own files — never in the draft
  • Every stat checked; stale numbers cut

Principle 4 (always ask for the receipts).

The Demonstration: One Instruction

"I want you to use Ansari to verify all the hadith and Qur'an in the presentation."

  • 16 references checked, verdicts logged
  • The output is a factcheck file: receipts I keep

Converting It All Into Slides

  • Everything was markdown — the deck is one more conversion
  • 75 slides, delivered — Oakville, May 2026

Principle 3 (expand the box).

Preparing for the Thinking Muslim Interview

  • I was also preparing for an interview with Jalal — it covered some of the same material
  • He sent his questions — over half grounded in material from the talk
  • My instruction: "fill in answers from what we already have"

s.iaser.ai/tm — the Thinking Muslim lecture

Principle 2 (the factory) — answering a format it had never seen.

Fresh Research for the Interview

  • "Environmental impact of AI?" — beyond the talk
  • Cited report; unverifiable claims labeled
  • Claude wrote it; Gemini checked it

Principle 4 (the receipts), again.

Then London, On My Way Here

  • "Can you give a 15-minute talk?"
  • The 4 points I want to make
  • Same material — some updating, that was it

30 minutes

to prepare it — five days before this workshop

The chain so far:

6 bullets → a one-hour talk → a podcast → 15-minute remarks. Each in my voice. Each verified once.

The Video Comes Out

  • Thinking Muslim → YouTube; me → LinkedIn
  • AI drafts the post — in my style, from the style file
  • It doesn't quite nail LinkedIn — browser control gets it there, but I still review and post
  • My edits go back into the file

Principle 2 (the factory) — and its improvement loop.

The Systematic Way

  • Download the transcript
  • AI scans it for soundbites
  • Cut text = cut video

Principle 3 (expand the box).

▶ English

the excerpt, as posted — 57 seconds

Reach the Ummah in Its Languages

  • Subtitles → translated voice → cloned voice (ElevenLabs)
  • My voice, speaking Arabic
  • Native-speaker review — own voice only, disclosed

Even Dubbing Is One API Call

  • ElevenLabs has a dubbing API: send a video, get it back dubbed — 90+ languages
  • So your AI can write the code that dubs every excerpt automatically
  • Clip → dub → post — the pipeline becomes part of your factory

The French Version Took One Sentence

Made while building these slides.

▶ العربية

the same excerpt — my voice, dubbed into Arabic

The Four Timeless Principles, Again

  1. Understand what AI is for — and what it is not for
  2. Don't just build a car — build the factory — with its improvement loop
  3. Expand the box that AI works in
  4. Always ask for the receipts

A File Written for Your AI

  • On the follow-up page: for-your-ai.md — instructions your AI reads directly
  • It teaches your AI this system — and how to set it up with you

Following Up

  • walee.dk/gmc26 — for you and for your AI
  • Islamic checking: askansari.ai
  • AI and Islam org: iaser.ai

hi@walee.dk