Train ChatGPT to Write Like You: A Comprehensive Guide for Blog Posts, Marketing Emails, and More!
Ben Parisi
Founder, Benten Alignment Inc. | Democratizing AI Systems with Web3 | Aligning Humanity
Crafting content that captures the unique voice of your brand is a vital aspect of building your business's identity. However, as many small businesses turn to AI content generators like ChatGPT, they often face a common challenge - getting the AI to produce content that goes beyond sounding generic, instead authentically mirroring their unique tone and style.
The AI, no matter how sophisticated, lacks the personal touch and intimate understanding of your business's essence, making it challenging to produce content that feels true to your brand. You might end up with grammatically correct, technically sound content that, unfortunately, feels bland and fails to connect with your audience on a deeper level.
In this guide, we aim to tackle this issue head-on. We'll walk you through a series of prompts that train ChatGPT to write like you by analyzing your existing writing, extracting relevant information about your tone, and mimicking your unique style. This process can help infuse your brand's distinctive voice into the AI-generated content, giving it a personal touch that resonates with your audience.
This article builds on the lessons and prompts we learned in our recent posts,?Writing Marketing Emails with ChatGPT?and?Using ChatGPT to Write Blog Posts. Be sure to take a look at them first if you’re not already familiar with the process of generating content with ChatGPT.
Describing Your Tone
The first step to train ChatGPT to write like you is to give it a good understanding of your writing tone.?Contrary to what one might intuitively expect, AI struggles to infer your tone or style nuances on its own. Instead, we need to provide it with structured input and explicit instructions to effectively analyze and describe tone.
The prompt we've included below (developed by?Greg Kamradt @DataIndependent) does just that. It instructs ChatGPT to analyze examples of your writing, considering multiple aspects of your content like pace, mood, voice, diction, syntax, and more. This comprehensive analysis allows the AI to glean insights into your distinctive writing style.
Here's the prompt that will guide ChatGPT through this process:
You are an AI Bot that is very good at generating writing in a similar tone as examples. Be opinionated and have an active voice. Take a strong stance with your response.
HOW TO DESCRIBE TONE:
START OF EXAMPLES
[A few examples of things you’ve written that you want ChatGPT to mimic the tone and style of]
END OF EXAMPLES
List out the tone qualities of the examples above.
Now, you might wonder if it's necessary to consider all these aspects, especially if some seem irrelevant to your content type. For instance, foreshadowing and climax might not appear pertinent when you're writing a business blog post or a marketing email. However, each aspect plays a part in the overall tone, and even if it seems insignificant, it contributes to the holistic understanding of your style. The AI will determine the relevance of these aspects on its own when analyzing your writing and describing your tone.
Take Advantage of the Model’s Bias
Every language model, including ChatGPT, has inherent “biases” formed during its training process. These biases help it understand different types of content. For example, if you ask ChatGPT to write a poem, it has a strong idea of what a "poem" should look like. This understanding is based on countless examples it encountered during training, which means it will often produce a certain structure and style unless instructed otherwise.
Interestingly, this concept applies to mimicking the writing style of specific individuals as well. For instance, if we asked ChatGPT to write like Bill Gates, it would rely on its ingrained understanding of how Bill Gates writes, producing content in a similar style.
The challenge arises when you want to train ChatGPT to write like you by mimicking?your?unique writing style. To overcome this, we can identify which famous writers or public figures your writing style resembles most closely, and then instruct ChatGPT to write like these figures, effectively leveraging the model's bias to our advantage.
In practice, this can be done by asking ChatGPT to analyze your writing examples and identify which established writers' styles most closely match your own. Let's see how this works with the following prompt:
You are an AI Bot that is very good at identifying authors, public figures, or writers whose style matches a piece of text. Your goal is to identify which authors, public figures, or writers sound most similar to the text below.
START OF EXAMPLES
[A few examples of things you’ve written that you want ChatGPT to mimic the tone and style of]
END OF EXAMPLES
领英推荐
Which authors (list up to 4 if necessary) most closely resemble the examples above? Only respond with the names separated by commas.
Credit for this technique goes to?Scott Mitchell.
Writing with Your Tone & Style
With the tone description and author identities in hand, we are now ready to train ChatGPT to write like you with your unique style and tone. The key here is to effectively communicate all these parameters to the AI in a structured manner.
We’ll create a template that you can prepend to all of your prompts, where you want ChatGPT to mimic your tone and style. This template is designed to clearly specify your tone, reference the authors whose styles are similar to yours, and give explicit instructions for the AI to follow.
By combining these elements, we create a framework to train ChatGPT to write like you, guiding its responses towards the tone and style that reflect your unique writing voice. This allows you to create consistent, personalized content across different platforms, ensuring your brand voice is heard distinctly.
Let's see how we can incorporate all these elements into a final prompt template:
INSTRUCTIONS
- You are an AI Bot that is very good at mimicking an author's writing style.
- Your goal is to write content with the tone that is described below.
- Do not go outside the tone instructions below
Mimic These Authors:
[Results of prompt 2]
Description of the authors tone:
[Results of prompt 1]
YOUR TASK:
[Continue with your prompt as normal for whatever it is you want ChatGPT to write about]
This template serves as a comprehensive blueprint for training the AI, which allows us to consistently create personalized content across various platforms. We've made the process seamless and straightforward, and the best part is, once set up, this template can be reused, saving you time and effort while maintaining the distinctiveness of your brand voice. This is the power and potential of generative AI in crafting content that truly represents you and your business.
Conclusion
As we wrap up this deep dive into harnessing ChatGPT's power for genuine, brand-specific content creation, it's clear that the realm of AI offers boundless possibilities for small businesses. While mastering the techniques outlined above can be transformative, the rapid advancement in AI means there’s always more to learn and adapt.
If you're excited about the future of AI in small businesses and would like to stay informed about emerging AI tools, I invite you to subscribe to my?Hallucinations AI Newsletter. The newsletter focuses on empowering small business owners by providing valuable insights, prompt engineering guides like this one, and use cases for incorporating AI into everyday operations.
I'm committed to helping small businesses navigate the ever-evolving technological landscape and revolutionize their operations. So why wait? Join our community and let's explore the transformative potential of AI together.
All of this article's content was generated by GPT-4, prompted by Ben Parisi.
This article first appeared on the Aiva.Work blog at?https://aiva.work/resources/train-chatgpt-to-write-like-you.