Rich Brooks opened a blog draft his Claude project had written from a podcast transcript and counted the word “actually” seven times in about 2,000 words. His first thought was that Claude had picked up a bad habit. Then he checked himself. Rich says “actually” about that often. Claude hadn’t drifted from his voice. It had copied it exactly.

I laughed when he told that story on The AI Social Playbook, partly because I recognized it. When I first trained an AI on my own writing, I gave it samples from more than 1,000 of my articles and asked it to describe how I write. It told me I prefer prose to lists, I lean on sci-fi and history for analogies, and I like breaking technical ideas down into simple ones. All useful. What that analysis couldn’t tell me was which of my habits I’d want left out.

If you run social for a brand or for clients, you’ve probably hit the same wall. You finally get a custom GPT or a Claude project writing captions that sound like the brand. A few weeks later, you notice every caption opens the same way, or every Instagram post carries the same cluster of emojis, and you’re back to editing by hand. The training worked. You never told it which parts of the voice to leave behind.

Rich’s setup shows why this happens. His project, the AOC Podcast Producer, starts from the episode transcript. As he put it on the show, you’re working from your exact words and your guest’s exact words, so the AI has the voice sitting right in front of it.

Source link