I spent months trying to get an AI to write like me, but it kept sounding wrong.

I was feeding it my old forum posts from 2018, but the tone was always flat. The thing that tipped me off was my wife reading one and asking, 'Did you have a stroke?' She said it had my words but none of my usual energy. What's the real trick for making an AI copy a personal writing style without sounding like a robot?

5 comments

5 Comments

the_jana2mo ago

Forget the polished stuff... feed it your drunk texts to the group chat, that rant about the neighbor's dog, even your grocery list with "ice cream x3" circled. The AI needs to see you forgetting commas, using all caps for dumb excitement, typing "lol" when nothing's funny. That's where the actual voice hides, in the garbage posts you'd never save on purpose.

wood.eric24d ago

That part about "the AI just can't catch the vibe of a real person thinking out loud" is where I gotta disagree. I think the messy stuff actually works way better for teaching it that vibe than you're giving it credit for. A drunk text or a dumb grocery list with "ice cream x3" is literally a person thinking out loud with zero filter. That's the rawest version of a voice you can get. The polished posts are the ones that sound fake because people edit themselves too much. Give me the junk any day, it's got more personality than a final draft ever will.

jakejones24d ago

Read this thing the other day about how musicians train AI on their demos, not the final tracks, cause the mistakes have the actual feel. Same logic applies here. Your drunk texts to the group chat are the demos, man. The random "lol" when nothing's funny or the way you type "omg" in all caps for something dumb like finding a matching sock. That's the raw data the AI needs to stop sounding like a robot that read a thesaurus.

the_tyler2mo ago

Your wife's comment is spot on, that's the exact problem. The AI gets the dictionary but misses the music. I found you have to feed it your angry posts, your tired posts, the really dumb jokes. It needs the messy stuff, not just the clean examples.

wade8712mo ago

Tbh the messy stuff helps but it's still missing the human glue. @the_tyler is right about needing the music, but maybe the AI just can't catch the vibe of a real person thinking out loud.