Anthropic’s latest update introduces customizable writing styles for Claude AI, offering the potential to mimic individual or brand-specific tones. This innovation could unlock new business use cases, especially for creating content at scale. But how effective is it?
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Anthropics latest feature announcement Has maybe just maybe solved or at least Started to solve one of the Holy Grails Of AI for business welcome back to the AI Daily Brief there is a very common Pattern when people start interacting With generative Ai and basically that Pattern goes something like at first you Are absolutely Blown Away by Capabilities whether it's an image Generator like mid Journey a voice Synthesizer like 11 Labs or of course an Llm like chat PT or Claude the things That AI can do make you feel like a Wizard however inevitably the deeper That you get the more you find things That aren't quite right or are limiting In terms of just how far you can take it A great example in the image generation Space is consistent characters it's Wonderful if you're just trying to Create one-off images you can get Incredible Fidelity and specificity in Terms of what you want it to look and Feel like but if you're trying to do That across an entire range of images if You're trying to create the basis for Animation or a comic book it gets a lot Harder and lots and lots of effort has Been spent both from the Big Image Generation companies as well as third Parties on how to do that better and as That capability comes online the key Thing is that it unlocks an entire set
Of use cases that were otherwise cut off In the llm space one of those holy Grails in other words one of the types Of updates that could unlock a huge Number of new use cases or just just Improve what the llm is already being Used for in a fundamental and Significant way is the ability for an Llm to imitate a particular writing Style one of the things that people Figured out with chat GPT and Claude Quite quickly was that there is a Particular flavor and feel to llm Generated writing there are certain Words that get used way more by llms Than get used by real people words like Delve and just in general there's a Particular style that feels Recognizable now there are ways that you Can use prompts to try to get around That you can coach the llm to write in a Particular way you can give it References but one of the things that People have Most Wanted is the ability To just upload a set of their own Documents and have the llm be able to Natively copy them in fact I've tried Extensively to do this I built a custom GPT which as you can see has like 15 Reference documents from short essays to Long form writing and the short of it is That it's only Okay it definitely makes Chat gbt not sound like chat gbt and it Certainly has some patterns that mimic
How I write but it also doesn't really Sound like me certainly not enough that I'm going to Outsource important writing To it in any sort of short order other Companies recently have tried to Productize versions of this spiral for Example is a product from Every Which Does something in this space their Approach is really interesting basically They're trying to make it easy for you To translate one type of content to Another so so I can say I'm generating YouTube videos podcasts and Linkedin Posts and then it shows you how it can Take that source workor and turn it into Lots of other posts now part of the Process is that it tries to retain style As it builds out the set of additional Assets so for example they let you play With historical examples as a way to Demonstrate what it can do and yet still What people have really wanted is this To be built natively into the llms Themselves and for it to be good And so when anthropic announced this new Style feature yesterday people in the Know really got excited Matt wolf for Example wrote I feel like this is a Feature that everyone's been wanting and Waiting for unfortunately this news has Been overshadowed by the Sora leak which Has already been shut down this is Bigger in my opinion anthropic for their Part announces with Styles you can now
Customize how Claude responds select From the new preset options concise Explanatory or formal and so there are Actually two parts of this feature The first is that there is just a Built-in style selector where any prompt That you have you can say if you want it To be normal the default responses from Claude concise shorter responses and More messages explanatory educational Responses for learning or formal clear And well structured responses that on Its own is a really great feature it Allows you to not have to prompt to be Clear about the style that you want it's Instead now built into the UI however The real choose and what's got people Excited is the fact that you can create And edit Styles so what you do is you Select the Styles menu press create and Edit Styles and then create custom style From here you can add a writing example Which can be a document or you can copy Paste text or you can simply describe The style you're going for I added a Recent post from LinkedIn that I had Written that was a little bit longer and More substantial more blog posty and What it came back with was a style that It called Tech translator the style Summary was deliver analytical insights Through conversational and authoritative Communication so now when I go back Let's say write a short blog post about
AI agents in the Enterprise emphasize that while they Might not be production ready yet 2025 Is likely the year where people start Integrating agents at their companies And Forward Thinking Enterprises should get ahead let's copy This let's do it normal first and you Get this piece AI agents in the Enterprise preparing for the 2025 wave This because it's clawed sounds nothing Like me it has nothing to do with how I Would write just by way of one example The paragraphs are much longer than Would make sense for the type of style That I'm going for now let's try it with The tech translator style the style that It created for me this is certainly not Perfect perfect it's a little more tweet Than I'd like to think that I am the First paragraph is let's get real about AI agents in the Enterprise while Everyone's Watching demo videos and Proof of Concepts most companies are Still sitting on the sidelines and Honestly that's been the right move Until now that is so much closer to how I write short Cris sentences Punchy and Trying to get people to pay attention Now it's very hard of course to describe In the context of a podcast whether this Works better but my point is that at Least in my initial trials this gets a Heck of a lot closer natively than the
Stuff I've done before and in the Context especially of imagining a use Case where a company is trying to Mass-produce content this is such a huge Unlock in terms of the average quality Of a piece of writing that's going to Come from Claude now not everyone has Been super impressed Matt wolf got a Style summary that said deliver Technical AI news with enthusiastic Conversational expertise that makes Complex topics engaging and accessible But he said unfortunately I'm kind of Disappointed I uploaded 90 minutes worth Of transcripts and I don't think this Reads like me at all luckily I can give Feedback and try to get it even closer One thing I will point out is that Matt Uploaded YouTube transcripts which are Him talking that's different than Writing and I wouldn't be surprised if That's a tougher translation for this Technology but regardless of what the Source is the point is that it's Important to not overstate how close This Hues to an individual style I think The real value and where a lot of people Are going to get excited is a little bit Copying their own style but but a lot Being able to create a bank of existing Style presets that make it much faster To toggle and get the exact type of Output you want for any particular given Use case this to me perfectly
Encapsulates where we are with the Development of llms it is not just about Pushing the state-of-the-art it is also About user experience and making these Things actually work on a personal and In a business context with that in mind I think writing styles is a huge upgrade And one that I'm excited to play with More for now that that's going to do it For today's AI Daily Brief until next Time peace