Tried an AI to write my weekly newsletter and it sounded like a robot

I fed my last 10 newsletters into an AI tool called CopySmith to see if it could make drafts for me. The first draft it spat out had zero personality and used words like 'leverage' and 'utilize' which I never use. Has anyone found a way to train these things to sound like a normal human talking?

3 comments

3 Comments

murray.robert4d ago

Read some AI researcher talking about how these tools basically guess what the next word should be based on a giant pile of business writing, so they default to that corporate jargon. They aren't really thinking about your particular voice. I tried feeding mine a bunch of my old emails and a few blog posts I liked, and it helped a little but not much. The big trick I found was to write a few example sentences in your real voice first, then tell the AI to "write like this" instead of just feeding it raw text. Still takes work though. You basically have to go back and strip out every 'leverage' and 'optimize' they throw in there.

jason_stone594d ago

Did you try feeding it actual emails you wrote or just stuff you liked from other people? There's a difference. I ran into the same problem until I gave it about 20 of my own replies from this forum stripped of any names or personal details. It still vomited out "to ensure" and "in order to" constantly. The example sentence trick works better but I found you gotta be super specific. Like "write like you're explaining this to a buddy over beers" not just "write casual." Everything still needs that final cleanup pass though.

cole_murphy4d ago

The example sentence trick is the only thing that ever worked for me too. I spent a whole afternoon feeding it old posts and it still wanted to say "in order to facilitate" like some kind of robot. What finally clicked was writing out like five short messages the way I'd actually type them, with all my weird word choices and sentence fragments. Then I just put those at the top of the prompt and said "sound like this." It still slips up but way less. The real killer is that you have to babysit every single output, there's no shortcut around that final pass where you kill all the "additionally" and "furthermore" stuff.