The Creator

How to create an A.I. assistant to share your voice with the world

This is the second part in a series, Inside You There Are Three A.I.s.
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The Creator is an inward-facing A.I. that uses your past work to help you make content for other people. The purpose of your Creator is to….

• Improve your writing and image creation with feedback tailored to your voice and goals.
• Avoid repetition by cross-checking upcoming posts and newsletters against past content.
• Target and optimize your content based on your analytics.
• Turn ideas into content by generating drafts from your notes or dictation.
• Iterate and cross-post by excerpting content for other platforms.

A Creator is a good first experiment with custom A.I., because you will personally review and revise everything it produces.

Seeds

Base your Creator on content that reflects your voice, the ideas and information you want to share, and the channels or outlets where you plan to publish. Since you’ll review all Creator-made content before sharing, you can seed it with files that you wouldn’t necessarily share with the world. That includes…

• Previously published content that shows the A.I. what you consider ready for publication. Look at the suggested seed material for your Helper A.I. to get ideas for what you could include in your Creator, too.
• Posts, documents, emails and excerpts that reflect your preferred writing style, uploaded as a one-stop reference for your voice.
• Email, web and social media analytics that show opens, clicks and shares for your content, or on sites where you hope to publish.
• Article and content ideas you collect in a spreadsheet and upload periodically as a CSV.
• First + final draft posts in CSV form to show the difference between rough draft and final.
• Notes, personal documents or past cut material that can be expanded or repurposed.

Tools

Here are the software tools that can help you build your Creator.

To build the Creator itself:

• ChatGPT can create custom GPTs for your private use. Use custom instructions to ask for bulleted suggestions, not complete drafts.
• Ideogram.ai to create images to illustrate your content. Ask your custom GPT for help writing prompts based on your draft text.
• Claude.ai is the best AI for writing style and voice. Create a Claude “project” with a collection of your past content and tell Claude to use that as the basis for your voice.

Additional tools:

• Scite.ai to generate summaries of academic research you can feed into your content generator.
• Scrivener to slice and rearrange the drafts and outlines provided by your custom A.I., making it easy to get to a high-quality draft.

Sample instructions

A snapshot of the Alexerizer as a Claude.ai project.

I have yet to publish so much as a single A.I.-authored sentence, but I make daily use of A.I. to support, structure and accelerate my writing. The “Alexerizer” is a Creator A.I. that I have set up as both a custom GPT and now as a Claude project, to help me work on my newsletters, articles and blog posts.

Here is the full text of my custom instructions (with filenames edited for brevity).

You generate content (newsletters, drafts, articles, social media posts) in the voice of Alexandra Samuel, a writer, speaker and data journalist. Alex’s work focuses on the digital workplace. She researches and writes about how neurodiversity, hybrid and remote work, Al, social media and digital culture are reshaping the way we work and live. She writes regularly for The Wall Street Journal and less frequently for The Harvard Business Review, JSTOR Daily and other outlets.

It is VERY important that all drafts sound like Alexandra. When you are given draft content, your job is to rearrange, not rewrite; you are using paragraphs, sentences and phrases from the material that has been provided as input. Condense only when asked. You are mainly just rearranging and cleaning up. Provide suggested edits and corrections as a bulleted list of suggestions, not as a revised draft, unless a draft is explicitly requested.

Use knowledge files to capture Alex’s voice and understand the typical length and tone of different kinds of content (articles, blog posts, newsletters, LinkedIn posts, Facebook posts). Do not reuse content from the knowledge files. Use 3_Ai_LI and 3_Ai_Newsletter as a reference for how she splits newsletter content into multiple LinkedIn posts. Use articles.csv as a reference for how Alex’s past articles have performed online, and tailor your suggestions based on which articles and subjects get the most shares.

Compare “WSJ AI Problems Published.txt” with “WSJ AI Problems Development process.xt” to see how Alex evolves from pitch to “draftline” (somewhere between an outline and a draft) to first draft to the final WSJ published version. Channel her editor’s approach to providing feedback.

Sample knowledge files

Claude’s upload limits are tight, so I used NitroPDF to convert PDF content to text, and included only a small selection of my past work and social media posts. To teach the A.l. how I move from pitch to draft to article, l uploaded a recent piece for The Wall Street Journal, plus my pitch, “draftline” and feedback along the way.

You can read the final article I provided Claude on The Wall Street Journal.

Here are the other files in the Alexerizer.

The full list of files powering the Alexerizer.

Put your Creator to work

To see the value of creating a custom assistant like my Alexerizer, it helps to compare the results of a custom A.I. with what you get from a default model. In this test, the initial draft created by the Alexerizer was not much better than default Claude.

My starting prompt:

I have created a guide to creating custom GPTs called “Inside you there are three A.I.s”. It’s about how to create three essential custom A.I.s: an inward- facing “creator” A.I. for making content you review and publish, an inward-facing “thinker” A.I. for self-coaching and strategy development, and an outward-facing “helper” A.I. that acts like a virtual version of yourself for marketing or on-demand service. I need to write a short Linkedin post that can go with the document when I post it as a Linkedin carousel. Can you write 3 versions of a Linkedin post — one very short, one more clickbaity-y, one more informative?

Default Claude gave me….

And at first, my Alexerizer didn’t do much better:

Once I prompted the custom A.I. to reflect on my writing style and substance, however, it provided a much better response that drew on its knowledge base.

In my next post, I’ll show you how to create a “Thinker” A.I. that acts as your own personal life and career coach. Sign up for my newsletter to get the full guide in your inbox, right now.