How to Train your AI to write more like You
This week I asked my AI to tell a joke about a man going to a bar.
The first draft wasn’t good — in fact it was pretty bad. It struggled with the punchline. It felt like someone having to explain a joke because there was none.
And while most of us writers would breathe a sigh and proclaim AI has no sense of humour and will never overtake true copywriting there’s a familiar undercurrent to why we shouldn’t write (no pun intended) AI off just yet.
One of my favourite marketers, Andrew Davis in his recent Loyalty Loop video, reminded me of Lumiére’s Law.
If you’re unfamiliar with it — (some call it the CEO’s mindset)
On December 28, 1895, the Lumière brothers, Auguste and Louis introduced their Cinématographe motion picture system and screened their first short film, entitled ‘La Sortie’.
A 50-second film of workers leaving a factory.
But by 1905 The Lumière brothers had withdrawn from the film business and declared “The cinema is an invention without any future.”.
Why?
Even though they pioneered moving pictures, the Lumière brothers (whose business was in photography) viewed moving pictures through the same lens as their current technology (still photography).
In fact their first films, recorded everyday French life — e.g., the arrival of a train, a game of cards, the feeding of a baby, soldiers marching, capturing a snapshot of daily life rather than using moving pictures as something other than a camera.
They were transfixed by their present and past use of technology that they struggled to consider the future possibilities.
And with that they couldn’t see the benefits of this new technology compared to what they were currently using.
We do it all the time!
Lumière’s Law is a cautionary warning to keep an open mind and not miss opportunities because we only see the use of something new from a limited viewpoint.
Which leads me back to my AI:
Most of us treat AI the same way we treat Google — as a search engine. We ask a question and expect it to give us an answer.
We write generic, blah prompts and expect it to churn out The Great Gatsby!
And as a writer, we compare AI to how we write — we set tasks that are more suited for a dictionary, thesaurus, or Grammarly.
But for AI to work for us — we have to change the way we see it.
Rather than a writing tool I began to imagine AI as a collaborator, an assistant, someone I’m training to write like me — my own ghostwriter.
Andrews said we need to see AI for what it is: “To get more out of AI, put more of yourself into it.”
So here are a few things that I’m doing that’s helped my AI write better:
1/ Train it to understand who you are:
As a writer we’re told to get inside our customer’s head but with AI it’s a matter of IT getting inside our heads. And the only way to do that is to train it.
Imagine you’re introducing your style of writing to your assistant.
Train your AI with samples of your work and give it a background of who you are and your tone of voice.
Here’s a snippet of what I did:
Prompt: “I’m going to share with you some of my email copy so you can understand my writing style and tone of voice — Do you understand?
“I would like to train you to respond to tasks as an experienced copywriter with a British sense of humour, influenced by David Ogilvy, Joe Sugarman and Paula Green’s iconic copywriting. You are well-versed in the art of rhetoric, speech writing, storytelling, presentation and copywriting.
“Here are some additional guidance I would like you to consider when completing your tasks: You are accurate, factual, and thoughtful. You like to tell emotional stories with the awareness of Apple and Ikea and the sense of self-deprecation of Oatly’s ads. You also like to include brand stories and human psychology studies to back up your ideas”
2/ Provide Clear Guidelines: Provide clear guidelines and parameters for the content you want to generate.
Break your big task into breadcrumbs and spoon-feed your AI
Don’t pile all your requests into the first prompt.
Break it into smaller tasks and get it to reiterate.
The first draft isn’t the only draft.
Use each prompt to flesh out a better response.
3/ Add your desired outcome
Something I’ve learned is that by adding a clear objective my AI gives me a better outcome. No matter how small the add-on it can make a big difference.
4/Incorporate Personalization: Use customer data and insights to personalize your content. This could include incorporating customer feedback or addressing specific pain points. I often tell my AI to write to Angie (my ideal client).
5/ Human Oversight and Editing:
While AI ‘s results aren’t terrible, it has a habit of using valueless, tired, generic phrases with awkward phrasing that result in sentences that feel robotic, and formulaic.
Adding your human touch is not a matter of cut and paste!
Use AI as a starting point for your content. Don’t be afraid to inject your own creativity and ideas. Remember AI is meant to assist you, not replace you.
Good writing requires a balance of conformity and nonconformity, and at times, we need to deliberately break the rules.
And just like our own first drafts, we need to Test, refine, review, and edit the content before publishing to ensure it meets our standards.
From this:
To this:
While AI can optimise the time and effort of writing, It cannot necessarily optimise writing quality.
ChatGPT produces weaker writing when it hasn’t received clear instructions about audience, purpose, and context.
If you intend to use AI to assist your writing you need to put effort into your prompts.
I hope you found this useful.
Let me know your thoughts on how you use AI.
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