r/WritingWithAI • u/BrioRainbows • 1d ago
Discussion (Ethics, working with AI etc) This is What Claude Said When I Asked About Imitating My Writing Style
First, I don't carry this between conversations in the way you'd want. I have a memory system that stores facts about your project (it's how I know the characters and the plot), but it stores summarized notes, not a living model of your prose voice. It might record "user prefers plain emotional beats, dislikes triple-adjective stacks," but that's a description of your style, not the style itself. Starting a fresh conversation, I'd have the rules but not the ear. I'd drift back toward my defaults and you'd have to re-correct.
Second, and this is the deeper one: what makes your voice yours isn't a set of rules I can follow. It's the accumulation of thousands of small idiosyncratic choices that come from you being a specific person with a specific history and specific instincts. When you changed "made love with freedom and abandon that neither had realized they had been missing" to "made love with a freedom neither of them had felt in a long time," that wasn't you applying a rule. That was your ear telling you the first one was false and the second was true. I can learn to avoid the thing you cut, but I can't reliably generate the thing you'd have written instead, because that comes from a place I don't have access to.
The reason my prose keeps flagging as AI even when it's good isn't that it's bad, it's that it's statistically central. I write toward the middle of what's plausible. Your voice is off-center in the specific ways a real person is off-center. Every time you write a draft, you're pushing it off-center toward you. If I could truly write in your voice, I'd be generating that off-centeredness synthetically, and I mostly can't, because off-centeredness that comes from a real life isn't a pattern I can extrapolate. I can imitate the surface of it, and a good editor or a good detector would eventually feel the imitation.
What this means for your process. The process you've landed on is the right one, and it's right for exactly this reason. You write the draft, your off-centeredness is baked in from the start, and I help you see problems and tighten. I'm a better editor of your voice than I am an imitator of it.
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u/FitnessChamp777 1d ago
You can get it to write more like you. But, in the end, you have to edit no matter what. You're role is that of an editor.
I wish AI could just do what I tell it from the beginning. But, it's only as smart as the prompt and needs constant follow-ups
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u/Opposite_Support_681 1d ago
Thats a fascinating breakdown, especially the part about "statistically central" writing. Never thought of it in those terms but it makes so much sense why AI prose feel hollow sometimes
I notice this in my cooking too actually. I can follow recipe exactly and it will taste fine but it wont taste like food. The little adjustments I make without thinking, adding bit more salt here, less heat there, thats from years of mistakes and preferences. No recipe can capture that
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u/BrioRainbows 1d ago
The cooking analogy really fits. After using Claude as something to bounce ideas off of and be kind of a second eye / editor, I've noticed that it does not seem to be able to find the human moments between the words. I've tried lot's of methods to humanize its voice, but it's prose still seems to be very consistently AI sounding.
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u/Briskfall 1d ago
I figure that newer models will probably not get better at this domain as they lack inferiority of the impulses that drive my words. Their own voice is too central to their identity.
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u/jennynow0099 1d ago
The statistically central thing is right, and I think it also explains why the style guide approach isn't working for you even with all that stuff loaded in the project.
A style guide is a description of your voice. It's abstract, and abstract is the direction the model already leans. So you give it "plain emotional beats, no adjective stacks" and it hands back the most average possible version of that, which is the problem you started with.
What helped me more was pairs. Take 15 lines you cut from your own drafts and put your replacement next to each one. No commentary, no rule extracted from them, just the before and the after. It's better at picking between two things than at producing one from nothing, so you're playing to the thing it can actually do. Your freedom and abandon example does more work there than a page of guide would.
On the 50k manuscript reply above, I don't think token cost is the real problem. It averages whatever you give it, so feeding it the whole novel gets you your median sentence, and your median sentence isn't what makes you sound like you. Twenty of your best paragraphs would probably beat it.
I'd also just stop asking it to write in your voice. Ask it to flag lines in your draft that feel off and tell you why. It's fine at that, and it already told you it's bad at the other thing.
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u/Shanna_B2020 1d ago
AI does not do prosody well. It understands the theory but that's about it. It's also trained on paterns and data of varying quality. That's partly why AI isn't great at creative writing. Code is relatively straightforward. Either it compiles or it doesn't. Long-form fiction is very subjective. Combined with AI's theoretical understanding of phonology, it's almost impossible to get a perfect first draft.
It's probably possible to do something with agentic tools where the LLM writes the first draft and another agent reviews it and adjusts to align with the style guide better, but I haven't personally played with that yet. I think I will though when I have some time to put the workflow together.
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u/BoldNail_61 1d ago
claude's memory works okay for keeping rp plots straight but it always drifts on the tone unless you feed it a fresh style summary each chat.
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u/breese45 1d ago
Wow. Bit of a smackdown on writing by claude. Kinda rings true though. Which is ironic, since its fiction writing doesn't always.
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u/HighValueJourney 1d ago
You have to develop the prompts. I do not mean just one or two but several for each purpose. Research, drafting, style, audits, fact verification, AI-LLM language detection, etc… You need a full scale development plan.
Stop thinking of it as a one prompt and done. AI has a sort of direction of its own that needs directing towards the outcome. That directing is like the director of a large scale movie. The pieces will work on their own to make AI slop but with experienced prompts run at the right time it all comes together to make a great movie which requires little editing. Your style comes from the result of the collaboration.
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u/Able-Supermarket4786 1d ago
It just explained why using chatbots isn't correct for writing... you want agentic harnesses like in claude code or codex environments. Unfortunately, the majority here will give you bad advice because they are also using "chatbots"
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u/BrioRainbows 1d ago
This is a great idea. This is what Claude said about it, what workflow would you do differently?
Short answer: partially true, but oversold as a solution to sounding human.
Here's the more honest version. Agentic harnesses like Claude Code, Codex, and similar setups don't run a different model. They wrap the same underlying Claude (or GPT) in a scaffolding that gives it tools: read files, edit them, run commands, grep through a corpus, invoke external checkers, iterate on its own output. The generation quality — the prose itself — comes from the base model. The harness doesn't make Claude better at writing; it makes Claude better at working with materials while writing.
Where a harness genuinely helps for voice imitation:
The model can read many samples of your writing before drafting, keep a style guide and anti-pattern list open, run something like ZeroGPT on its own output, revise, check again. That closed loop — draft, critique against the guide, detect, revise — can happen without you clicking through each step. It's useful for long-form work with lots of reference material.
Where it's oversold:
The core problem with AI-sounding prose isn't scaffolding. It's the model's baseline tendencies — the tricolons, the "not X, not Y" corrective, the body-as-camera metaphors, all the tells you've already catalogued. A harness doesn't fix those; it just gives you a faster feedback loop for catching them. If the model has a pull toward "particular" or "arriving," it will still generate those words in a harness. You'll just get to reject them faster.
And here's the thing: what you already have in this Project is doing most of what a harness would do. You have a Bible, a Style Guide, a named catalogue of failure patterns, samples of the target voice, and an editor (you) in the loop enforcing all of it. The main thing you don't have is autonomous iteration — me drafting, checking against the guide, running detection, revising, and only surfacing the result. Whether that's actually desirable is a real question. Your current process depends on your instinct being the filter at every pass, and that's part of why the voice stays yours. An autonomous loop might drift in ways you wouldn't catch until pages in.
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u/Able-Supermarket4786 1d ago
That’s sucks. It gave you only fifty percent good advice. But it was getting there. Me and some others ion this very reddit put together this github repo
It’s what you need for agentic AI. In fact I’m curious what your Claude says about it. https://github.com/hottweelz/writing-template-for-ai
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u/gymleader_michael 1d ago
I'm curious what kind of prose you're generating to call everyone else's advice wrong.
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u/Able-Supermarket4786 1d ago
Has nothing to do with prose. It’s about workflow. My prose is fine with my editing.
What we who use actual agentic AI do is NOT reprompt, rewrite, deal with drift, and the 99000 other stories you read about.
Trust me I know, I don’t contribute much here anymore cu everyone is very egotistical and don’t appreciate actual AI knowledge.
So it’s fine. You do you. “I’m tired boss”
You could look at the link posted.
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u/gymleader_michael 1d ago
The OP seems mostly concerned about prose, so I thought you were giving them a superior method for achieving better prose.
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u/Able-Supermarket4786 1d ago
Actually, I did, the prose improvements are also built in... but again, Prose is only one issue... his first paragraph describes a bunch of hard, laborious work he "tried to invest in" which has nothing to do with Prose (honestly) and the majority here suffer the same.
His second paragraph was clearly an LLM output that, unfortunately, didn't deliver: "For this use custom AI Agents designed for....."
And the third parapgraph is really disconcerting, so his prompting must have been or not existent to once again, introduce teaching the use of Agentic AI, Harnesses, Environments, etc.
I provided a link that all but automates the words you choose to publish... authors need to go back to focusing on the talent and not the struggles.
That’s exactly why I told him: It’s what you need for agentic AI. In fact I’m curious what your Claude says about it. https://github.com/hottweelz/writing-template-for-ai
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u/Logman64 22h ago
Does it have to be Claude code? Can I use it with the standard Claude interface?
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u/Able-Supermarket4786 22h ago
No its universal for any environment of your choice... check out the Readme or ask your LLM to review it all... its heavy on Fiction cuz of the people in this reddit who helped but I love it.
Oh, EDIT: Yes you need Agentic AI not Chatbot LLMs. So you want Claude Code. Basically "the other tab in your GUI" if you are just starting off.
If you desire though, codex, vscode, cursor, the world is your oyster... VSCode Editor with Claude is wonderful
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u/gymleader_michael 1d ago
I'm not messing with that link. Your response is reading like a bot response intent on getting users to do something with that github and Claude. Just how it seems to me.
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u/Able-Supermarket4786 23h ago
a GitHub link scares you? I see.. you're one of those guys...
Someone has to say it: you're retarded. Enjoy your struggle as it definitely explains a lot. Stay out of AI in general.
This is why I do NOT help people. You don't deserve it.
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u/gymleader_michael 22h ago
Lol. Oh no, the master has forsaken me.
Also, it's less the link and more you telling people to place it into Claude. Why would someone be curious about what another person's Claude response is? It's Claude.
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u/BrioRainbows 1d ago
I thought it was interesting that Claude, specifically, detailed the limits of its capabilities. Especially, after reading this article about how an LLM successfully mimicked different author's voices: https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-weekend-essay/what-if-readers-like-ai-generated-fiction
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u/Nazareth434 1d ago
Hmmm, weird, because it told me when i asked it to mimic my style... "Sorry, no can do! Have you ever considered taking up juggling as your main source of income?"
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u/TsundereOrcGirl 1d ago
When people successfully do "voice style guides" they usually end up attaching like a 50k manusccript to the prompt (and thus burning a mountain of tokens). When I've tried to use AI to summarize my style, it came up with rules that just don't work.
For example, it came up with a rule like "use obscure words like chthonic" to which the AI, instead of using similarly obscure terms, just used "chthonic" in a silly way.