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Want to discuss with a person how you can do this, too?
Generating quality content with your “voice” is a straightforward process.
- Define Your Persona
- Collect and Organize Your Content / Documents
- Save All Training Documents Where You Can Easily Get Them
- Teach ChatGPT to Learn Your Style From the Content You Collected
- Generate Your Content and Save It for Future Use
Below you’ll find detailed instructions and demonstrations.
1. Define Your Persona
First, you need to understand who you are, what your voice is, and how you want to present your perspective to the world.
We’ll call this your Persona. It will be a very important part of this process.
Do you want to come across as friendly and approachable? Professional and formal? Distant and official? Casual or intense?
You don’t have to be rigid about it. Our personal style tends to change over time, anyway.
But you should have a pretty good sense of who you are, and how you want to “sound” in your writing.
Take some time to think about how you want your style to come through.
Now, you can have one major overarching Persona for all your writing. That way, your voice will be consistent, no matter what the situation.
But you may also want to develop different personas, depending on the situation:
- Professional situations
- Personal interactions
- Official situations (like when corresponding with authorities)
Or you can keep it simple and have one main Persona for all your writing.
The point is, you have options. You have a choice.
Now, let’s build out your Persona.
2. Collect Content to “Build Out” Your Persona.
AI can do a lot of things, but it can’t read your mind. It is only as good as:
- The information that trains it
- The directions you give it
When you collect writing samples that represent your voice, you give it what it needs to represent you the way you want. You’ll can use:
- Blog Posts
- Emails
- Transcripts of Conference Calls, Podcasts, Public Appearances*
- Letters
- Stories
- White papers
- Any other writing that is “100% you” and has your style all through it.
*Note: If you have audio of yourself speaking in your own authentic style, such as a podcast or other recording, you can use speech-to-text (like AssemblyAI) to convert it to text so you can use it.
The more content you give to the AI that is consistently “you“, the better it can reproduce your style.
2A. Don’t Have All the Content You Need?
You can create “dummy” content. You can type up a bunch of samples, making sure that they really sound like you. Sometimes it’s easier if you talk, dictating text into your phone, or or on your computer. You just copy that text into text files and save them with your other content.
If you’re going to be using your persona for different types of writing, it’s a good idea to have a variety of text that shows your range of expression. Your communication style naturally varies in different types of situations. The more information you can give ChatGPT about how you talk in a variety of situations, the more chance there is that it will sound like you.
Remember, the quality of AI is all about the quality of what has gone into it. The concept “GIGO – Garbage In Garbage Out” applies 100%. If you give poor quality content to ChatGPT, chances are pretty good you’re gonna get poor quality back. But if you give it a lot of content that has a nice range and is truly representative of your style, that can pay off in the long run.
3. Save All of the Training Documents in a Place That’s Easy To Get To.
That could be on Dropbox, Google Drive., iCloud, or some other shared drive. The point is, you want to be able to re-use those documents, no matter where you are in the world or whatever device you happen to be on.
If you have collected different documents for different purposes, like a bunch of blog posts for Blog Persona, you can save them in their own folder(s).
The important thing is to keep everything well organized – and also accessible to you, no matter where you are.
You may want to create content when you’re at the public library, in a coffee shop, or in the parking lot of the ranger station of the park where you’re RV-ing. Putting your files on a shared drive makes sense.
You can now create quality content from anywhere.
Click the image for a quick video showing how you can collect and organize your content
3A. Combine Your Training Docs into One File
Note: Paid ChatGPT Plus lets you upload entire documents to train it for a Persona style. But the free version of ChatGPT does not let you do that. You have to copy and paste the content into the input field.
- Create a new blank document in the location where your content is saved.
- Open each document you want to use for training, and copy and paste its content into that blank document.
- Do the same with all the documents you want to use for training.
- Save the large document with a name that makes it clear that it’s for training AI.
When it comes to training content, there’s a fine line between quantity and quality. You want to have enough quality material to show ChatGPT how you want it to write. But you don’t want to spend all day.
Click the image for a quick video showing how combine multiple documents in one training doc
Also, there’s a limit on the amount of text you can paste into the input field in the free version of ChatGPT.
You can paste in around 4,000 characters (including spaces and punctuation). If you have more text than that, you’ll need to break it into smaller chunks and copy and paste them in separately.
If you have a whole lot of content to teach your writing style, you can always split it into separate documents that are less than 4,000 characters, each. You can usually use tools to see how many words are in your documents, so you know you’re not over your limit on each. (Here you can see this document can safely have twice as many words for training.)
But it can be a pain in the neck to copy and paste the contents of each of those documents, every time you want to train ChatGPT. So, decide where you want to put your energy.
It might be worth it, to “load up” on training. Or it might be too much work. It’s up to you.
4. Tell ChatGPT to Learn Your Style
Go into ChatGPT and type
Learn the style ____ from the content I am uploading.
Pick a style name that is easy to remember, and is also spelled in a unique way. In this case, I’ve used MyContent, which I will use later on.
ChatGPT will respond back that it can help, and it will ask you to upload the content or give it a sample text.
Click the image for a quick video showing the training process
4A. Open your documents and copy and paste the content into the input field.
Please note – in the free version of ChatGPT, content is used to train its model. So, if you don’t want your content used to train ChatGPT, make sure what you paste into it is not sensitive or private.
4B. After you upload your content, ChatGPT will reply with a summary of what’s in there.
Its responses are never identical from scenario to scenario, so if it doesn’t respond back with the summary of the style, prompted, “Summarize the style of the content I just uploaded“.
ChatGPT will then come back with this response, and you can modify it, if you like.
This summary is its understanding of your persona.
4C. You can fine-tune that summary based on some back-and-forth with ChatGPT.
It will show you a revised version of content it will produce, and you can adjust it from there.
Some changes you can ask for:
- Make it more conversational
- Make it more professional / formal
- Use (or don’t use) emojis
- Don’t use slang
- Use industry lingo
You can experiment with it as much as you like, till you get a style you’re happy with.
4D. Once you have a summary that works, copy the text into a text file and save it.
Save it to the same location your training sets are saved.
Give it a name that makes it easy to find and use.
You will be using that summary again in the future.
Click the image for a quick video showing how to save your summary for future reference
5. Now you can start generating content.
If you have a list of topics you want to write about, or you have an outline or a general idea of what you want to produce, just enter that into ChatGPT and tell it “Using the style of ______ write me a blog post / email / social media post about each of the following topics”.
ChatGPT will generate the content you’ve specified. And if you’ve been thorough up to this point, you may be pleasantly surprised how much it sounds like you.
As discussed, you’re going to need to edit the results for style, but you will be able to produce a large amount of content all at once, using this approach.
Click the image for a quick video showing how to generate and save your content
And now you have a way to produce a steady stream of content that uses your style.
Watch A Step-By-Step Demo: Creating Quality Content with Free ChatGPT
Note: the paid version of ChatGPT (and possibly other models) lets you save everything that you’ve done for future use.
With ChatGPT Plus, you can create Assistants and/or Custom GPTs by uploading documents that are saved until you delete them. This can be a huge time-saver, if you need to create a number of different personas, or you have a lot of content to train the system. But if you’re on a budget, and you’re looking for a free and easy way to leverage generative AI to produce a whole lot of content and very little time, this is it.
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