Have you ever wished you could clone your writing style, so you could produce content twice as fast? Imagine a tool that could mimic your unique tone and voice, offering a seamless extension of your personal brand. In this article, we’ll delve into the intriguing process of training ChatGPT to write in your unique tone of voice.
Whether you’re a seasoned writer or someone simply looking to automate some tasks, this guide is your ticket to achieving a personalized, AI-assisted writing style. And that’s great news for those of you who flunked English or have trouble stringing sentences together.
How To Train ChatGPT To Write Like You
If you use ChatGPT without giving it specific and precise prompts, then basically you will get generated responses that can be lacking in both integrity and substance. You can’t just press a few buttons and expect a large language model AI to produce a masterpiece like War and Peace.
It simply doesn’t work that way.
Instead, you have to be clever about what you want it to create for you, so that it can attempt to give you what you want — which is content that reads well, and includes complete sentences that sound like something you yourself might say.
So, for instance, if you’ve been using ChatGPT to write your social media posts or marketing materials, then you want the content that it generates to read like you actually wrote it.
And don’t think that some of your followers won’t notice the difference, especially if they have a keen eye for detail.
Modifying ChatGPT’s Writing Style
If you’ve played around with ChatGPT, you likely know that it can write in the style of Dr. Seuss, or William Faulkner, or the Old Testament. That’s because all of these things were part of its training data, or at least its training data taught it how to write in these ways.
But can you make it sound like your voice?
Before we explain the steps to show you how, we decided to ask ChatGPT itself what we should do to get it to write like us:
How should I train you to write like me?
And this is what it responded with:
Training an AI model like ChatGPT to write like a specific individual involves a process called fine-tuning. Fine-tuning requires a large amount of personalized data that closely matches the writing style, preferences, and characteristics of the individual you want to emulate. However, it’s important to note that as an AI model, I cannot be trained directly by individuals. Only OpenAI has the capability to train and fine-tune models like ChatGPT.
To create a personalized AI model, OpenAI would need access to a substantial dataset of your writings, including various types of texts such as emails, articles, or other forms of written communication. This dataset should be diverse, representative of your writing style, and cover a wide range of topics.
Once the dataset is available, OpenAI could apply fine-tuning techniques to fine-tune a base model like ChatGPT using your specific data. Fine-tuning involves exposing the model to the personalized dataset and optimizing it to generate responses that align with your writing style and preferences.
It’s important to understand that fine-tuning is a complex process, and the specifics depend on the capabilities and resources of OpenAI. As of now, individual fine-tuning of ChatGPT is not available to the public, but OpenAI may offer similar services or provide updates in the future.
So, keeping what the AI chatbot told us itself in mind, next we’re going to share with you the top 3 ways we found that will train ChatGPT to write like you.
How To Train ChatGPT To Write Like You
1. Setting The Scene
If you don’t give large language models (or LLMs) like ChatGPT specific prompts, then you should be disappointed with the result you get, because in themselves, they aren’t smart — well, they do ‘learn’ from humans after all.
That means you need to be really clever when instructing them on what to do, such as writing like a specific person, so that they can give you what you want, which are words and sentences that sound like something you’d actually say.
So to set the scene, you need to first give ChatGPT a prompt like this:
ChatGPT, I need your assistance in creating social media content for posting on TikTok [or whatever your writing purpose]. First, I want you to learn my writing style by analyzing the examples that I’ll provide for you. Then we can start creating content. Tell me to ‘GO AHEAD’ when you’re ready for me to prompt you with my writing examples. Keep saying ‘GO AHEAD’ for more examples. I will say ‘FINISHED’ when I run out of examples of my writing. When you see ‘FINISHED’, please confirm that you have saved my writing style.
These clear instructions let the AI chatbot know when it should expect your writing examples, and will prevent it from creating your content on a whim before you’re actually ready.
Note that this is easier to do with ChatGPT 4, because of its larger token limit.
2. The Art Of Fine-Tuning
Fine-tuning will basically make ChatGPT produce output that sounds like you. You will have to teach it by giving it lots of examples of how you actually write.
That’s how large language modeling works — you give the AI lots of things that you’ve written, such as emails, letters, short stories, social media posts, or even essays.
ChatGPT will read through them to learn about your style of writing. Once it has done so, it can begin to produce content that sounds more like you, and will also use the same words and phrases that you repetitively use.
When ChatGPT gives you the go ahead, all you need to do is copy and paste the text from one of your writing examples, as mentioned above, into the prompt box.
Make sure that you choose writing examples that represent your style well, including the average sentence length, colloquial vocabulary and tone, and format.
Once you’ve input one example in the prompt box, press Return. ChatGPT should then continue saying ‘GO AHEAD’ to get you to add more of your examples.
Providing the AI chatbot with at least three examples of your writing is suggested, making sure they’re at least 1000 words and cover different topics.
When you’ve given ChatGPT your last example, type FINISHED into the prompt box.
3. Create a Name For Your Writing Style
Although it’s not necessary, you can ask ChatGPT to give a name for your particular writing style, as well as ask it for a summary to ensure that it has understood your writing style with a prompt like:
Now call this [your name] writing style. Please summarize [your name] writing style, focusing on the tone and sentence structure.
This way, you can reference this writing style in the future, and (hopefully) it will be able to follow it without you needing to provide writing samples once again.
4. Practicing With The Bot
So, now that ChatGPT knows how you write, it’s time to let it know what you want it to write. You can start by thanking the AI chatbot — although it may sound silly, it’s been proven that being polite to ChatGPT actually gets you better results.
Now it’s time to prompt it with what you want to achieve.
For example, maybe you want to write a cool post for Instagram or a new Twitter X Post. Or perhaps you want to write a letter to your local town planning board, or a blog for your website, or even for homework help.
Tell ChatGPT exactly what context you need your content for, then let it know any other important details. So, if your content needs to include specific things like times and dates, then make sure to mention them in your prompt.
When ChatGPT provides you the first output, there’s a big chance that it won’t be perfect, but that’s okay. Now it’s time to ask the chatbot to do some more fine-tuning to make it just right.
Enter a prompt like:
Thanks for your work so far, ChatGPT. However, please can you make it [how you want it edited, such as shorter/longer, more serious/fun, or any other way you would improve it].
Or another alternative, such as:
Thanks for helping me, ChatGPT. I’m still not happy though, because I like this part [enter text], but not this part [enter text]. Can you please change the second part to be more [your adjective]?
You can keep giving the AI chatbot more specific prompts like those above until you’re happy with the output. The fine-tuning process is all about giving ChatGPT instructions that are as clear as possible, so that it understands your writing.
Just be patient, and you’ll get it to give you content that you’ll be proud to share with others.
5. Create New Custom Instructions
Once you’ve got ChatGPT writing in the tone you’re looking for, ask it to summarize the style it is using in a short, descriptive way that other instances of ChatGPT can understand and emulate. Then, you can add that to Custom Instructions and easily get bcak to where you were.
Final Thoughts
So there you have it, our simple steps on how to train ChatGPT to write like you, so that you create more engaging content with less effort.
Remember that giving ChatGPT specific and clear instructions to help it perform the fine-tuning process will give you the best results. And in that way, you’ll soon find that you can use AI to make your words appear more like an author has written them.
