Most people still treat prompting as a technical trick. It is closer to rhetoric: the discipline of shaping a situation so another intelligence understands the aim, the context, the audience, and the effect you intend.
When the brief is vague, the output drifts to the average — competent, and indistinguishable from everyone else's. When the brief carries a clear thesis, real constraints, useful examples, and a defined standard, the work starts to sound like you again.
The unit of leverage is the frame
A strong frame tells AI what matters. It sets the role, the problem, the audience, the evidence, the tone, the boundaries, and the kind of answer that would actually help — the situation, not just the instruction.
Rhetoric gives you leverage
Rhetoric teaches you to organise thought before expression. That is why it governs AI-assisted work: the clearer your intention, the more the output carries your judgement instead of the model's default.
The practical test
Before you prompt, ask: what decision should this help me make, who is it for, what evidence should shape it, what would make it unusable, and what would make it unmistakably mine?
Originality with AI starts when you stop asking for content and start governing the conditions for a useful, recognisably-yours answer.