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How To Use AI for Amazing Customer Profiles with Chad Thiele
By Darby Rollins · Published August 13, 2021 · 238 views on YouTube
Key takeaways
- Seed the AI with a short, plain-language starting point (a name, role, and topic) before asking it to build out a persona.
- Treat the AI as a collaborative assistant, not a generator: guide it with a lead-in, run a command, then review and steer the next step yourself.
- Know your topic well enough to fact-check the AI's output, since it can produce statements that sound true but are exaggerated or wrong.
- Turn on the setting that lets commands see the content brief so long-form work can be worked on in sections without losing context.
- Build personas before keyword research when writing a book or blog around an audience, since a strong narrative thread makes the rest of the content easier to write.
How do you use AI to write a customer persona?
Chad Thiele describes starting with a short “seed” — a plain-language sentence naming the persona (for example, “Frank is a carpenter”) — then asking the AI simple questions about that person’s failures, wins, family history, education, and interests. Each answer becomes material to build out a fuller persona over several rounds.
What is “the dance” in AI-assisted writing?
The dance is Chad’s term for the back-and-forth between writer and AI: the writer provides a lead-in sentence, runs a command, reads what the AI produces, and then either runs another command or writes a lead themselves to steer the next section. It is a deliberate, iterative process rather than letting the AI generate content unsupervised.
Why does knowing your topic matter when writing with AI?
Chad says the AI can produce answers that are “next to true” — partially accurate but exaggerated or factually wrong — especially on highly technical topics. Writers who know their subject well can catch these errors, while those who don’t risk publishing inaccurate content. He recommends seeding the top of an article with the specific facts you want included, so the AI has that context to work from even if the seed itself doesn’t appear in the final draft.
What mistakes should writers avoid when working with AI?
According to Chad, the two main risks are:
- Letting the AI just generate content without direction, comparing it to a boss who gives no instructions and then judges the result.
- Skipping the read-through, fact-check, and edit pass — treating yourself as more of a “chief editor” directing the process rather than someone who can hand off the work entirely.
He also notes the AI can contradict itself between paragraphs or repeat what it already said a paragraph or two earlier, which is another reason to stay closely involved in the writing.
How does persona work help with both books and blogs?
Chad argues that building a persona is more important upfront than keyword research when writing a book or blog. Once a strong persona exists, a writer can pull specific details from it — like a carpenter persona who enjoys fishing — to write content that resonates with readers who share those interests, creating what he calls the “narrative thread” that carries a book or blog forward.
Full video transcript
Hey, what’s going on everybody, Darby here. I’m joined today by Chad from AI Content Dojo. Chad’s been putting out some really amazing content lately, firstly on Shortly and now on Jarvis, and how to command Jarvis using boss mode — that feature to put more gasoline on the fire and help you write more content faster. But a lot of it comes really down to what you’re telling Jarvis and how you’re directing it in the first place. So I’m really excited to have Chad on with us today to talk about, from his experience using the command side of the AI, how we can work with Jarvis and help instruct it to build better, faster content in the context of books, blogs, and other forms of content. Chad, thank you so much for joining me today.
Oh man, my pleasure, thanks for having me. I come from a computer science background, so that’s kind of where I got the nerdy part of this. I’m the type of person who — I don’t know if you saw the post in the AI Content Dojo Facebook group where I posted a picture of a cafe and I’m just sitting there studying neural networks while everybody else is having conversations. I realized the “write for me” button was pretty cool, but there was a lot more power that could be had, so I worked with Shortly to develop the long-form capabilities of GPT-3. They were there, but nobody had really taken the time to create the extra capabilities besides just a write-for-me button. My involvement started there, helping Cass develop that product.
What is the simplicity — how does it boil down? Can you go a little more deep on that?
Sure. It’s actually just one or two words: plain language. If you figure out how to ask a human being something, you can figure out how to ask Jarvis something. I’ll drop a little surprise on you — after I found out I was going to be on your show, I started writing a book. It’s about personas — if you saw that video you shared, I think. It’s around the idea of personas as a starting point for blogs. I want to say up front that the most important part of this is knowing your topic really well. If you don’t know your topic well, you won’t know when Jarvis gives you something that’s “next to true” — partially true but exaggerated, or with statistics that are wrong. So you’ve got to be good with your topic.
In terms of creating really long-form content, you want the capability of outlining your outlines — almost like outline inception. Maybe your first outline is your chapters, and as you go into it you have second-level outlines that become your subheadings. This gives you the ability to lay out the message you want to get across from the beginning of your book to the end pretty well.
Actual content creation comes from two things in Jarvis: commands, and what I call the dance. The dance is where you provide a lead — “in this part of the book I need to start writing about the failures my persona might have.” My persona is a carpenter named Frank, and let’s say my blog topic is carpentry. I want Jarvis to help me write that persona. One of the things I’m taking advantage of is a new Jarvis feature — when this is turned on, and it’s darker gray when it’s on, the commands you run can actually see what’s in the content brief. That becomes important when you get really deep into your content and need a way to section off content to work on separately from the rest of it above it.
Starting with a seed is where I start my story for Frank — “meet Frank.” All of this is written by me; this is me seeding Jarvis to give him something to work with for this persona, and he’s going to use this to craft everything else for me. This is just plain language — you say something like “what failures has Frank experienced in his life,” just a plain question. And it’s AI, so it sometimes likes to embarrass you on camera, so we’ll see what happens here. I just ran a command — that’s command-enter at the end of the line — so: “what failures has Frank had in his life,” and it started with: Frank has had a few failures, he’s been offered to work for a company with better pay but he always feels like he would be a traitor if he left. At this point you could run another command, or do a lead — and this is the part that takes time too. You’re not just letting Jarvis generate your content for you; you’re working with Jarvis as an assistant.
Manny’s saying in the chat he never thought of using Jarvis to write the customer avatar — I think this is brilliant. One of the big questions we’ve seen in the last few months is how you can use Jarvis to write fiction stories or storylines, and it really comes down to character development and understanding — at the end of the day, if you’re going to write any book, you need to know the person you’re writing about inside and out. I love the way you’ve set this up; it’s setting the stage for the rest of your book for Jarvis to really be that powerhouse assistant you need. But it’s taking time — this isn’t just throwing stuff against the wall and praying Jarvis comes out with the perfect avatar. This is clearly a well thought out, intentional process.
I would recommend picking a gender based on your target audience, of course. A really high-level, ninja-master trick would be to look into things like Facebook Audience Insights and see who the majority of your audience is — are they women from 32 to 44, are they single, do they have kids — that kind of stuff might help inform who your avatar or persona is. The difficulty for me with this book in particular is that I’m writing a persona as an example throughout the book, so it’s automatically in the book. My own target persona — somebody who is a writer trying to write books and having writer’s block or creativity issues — is a separate persona you can’t see here. That’s your responsibility as the author, to make sure those open loops are closed, but also to sprinkle them in so people keep reading and stay engaged throughout your story.
Yeah, there’s a reason they talk about weaving the story — that’s kind of what it is. And of course, like the writer, this is your book — you’re at the helm, Jarvis is that little assistant sitting next to you, so make sure you use Jarvis as a cooperative tool or collaboration, not a generator of content. Just ask in plain language the things you want — ask about Frank’s wins in his family history, or his education and relationships, and at some point you’re going to have a really nice persona story.
I’m actually creating this book from the perspective of somebody who’s maybe starting a blog, but starting a blog is really close to writing a book in the sense that it’s a collection of content around an idea. When you have a really strong story to start with, you’re able to pick things out to write about. We know Frank is a carpenter with 18 years of experience, and this section here is his interests — it goes through things like “enjoys fishing.” I did not write that myself; Jarvis said he loves fishing, and I just ran with it. If I were blogging about a carpenter who lives in an area with lakes or rivers nearby, I could write specifically to that, and that person, when they stumble on your blog, would feel like you’re writing to them — “how does this person know me so well?” — and eventually that person might tell somebody else to check out the page. It’s giving me everything I needed.
In terms of blogs, I think the persona is more important right up front than even keyword research — that’s all secondary. But in the context of a book, you’re exactly right, I like to call it the narrative thread. If you have this story ready, the narrative thread comes easy; if you don’t, your narrative thread can trail off.
A question for you from Dean Davis: Chad, what’s the hardest part of writing with AI?
The hardest part — if you’re diving into a highly technical topic and the output is frequently giving you things you have to fact-check, it can actually slow you down. It comes back to really knowing the topic. Here’s another tip: if you’re writing about a highly technical topic and you’re consistently finding yourself fact-checking and finding it’s wrong, start with a seed at the top of the article and write in all the facts you want to have in your story — make that connection for Jarvis. Once Jarvis has that connection, all that information is at the top; it might not be part of your article going forward, but it’ll be there for it to hinge off of. That’s probably one of the most difficult things, and it boils back down to being the expert, doing the research, knowing your topic so you can be the fact-checker for Jarvis. The more you know your subject, the faster you’ll be able to do this.
Yeah, there’s another part of it you have to pay attention to — there are times where in one paragraph Jarvis will say something and the next paragraph will contradict it, so you’ve got to be careful with that, or two paragraphs down it’ll repeat exactly what it said previously. So being involved in the content, knowing the topic, is so important — you’re the writer, it’s still you at the end of the day publishing this thing, whether it’s a book, an article, or something else. When we’re looking at AI and its ability to produce content, if you’re not going to read through it, fact-check it, and edit it yourself, I think you’re not holding yourself to the standard you should be holding yourself to. You’re more like the chief editor in this case, really being the director of the show, versus needing to spend all your time stuck in the weeds staring at a blank screen. Just be smart about it and put out good content that’s really valuable to your reader — put out good content for Frank.
Think about it at your day job — if you have a boss who just says “hey, do this thing for me” without giving any instruction, there could be ten outcomes — which one is the one the boss wanted? But if the boss gives you solid instructions, you’re probably going to get it done faster and get done what the boss wanted. Another comment here said: “hey human assistant, do all this work on day one without training, and I’m not going to check it, but I’ll judge you based on the result” — that sounds like a terrible boss.
Yeah, an absolutely terrible boss. But no, this has been awesome, Chad, thank you so much for walking us through this — it’s definitely opened my eyes to some different ways to use Jarvis, especially on the customer persona side, and how that weaves into the narrative story. Really valuable stuff, and I think everyone watching can agree.
Thank you so much, Chad, for taking the time — I know it’s late over there where you’re at.
My pleasure, man, we appreciate it, thanks for having me on.
You bet. All right everybody, we’ll be signing off here — go crush it with Jarvis. Chad, before we sign off, where can people go to find out more about you, if they want to continue to follow your content and AI Content Dojo?
There’s really three places: AIContentDojo.com, the YouTube channel is also AI Content Dojo, and I hang out in the AI Content Dojo Facebook group, and also the Jarvis community too.
Go connect with Chad on his YouTube channel and at AIContentDojo.com. And if you’re not already a member of Jarvis Underground, go find our Facebook group — it’s Jarvis Underground, the secret society of authors powered by AI. We talk about all things related to books, writing, editing, publishing, selling, and promoting your books so you can amplify your impact, reach more people, get on more stages, and find more audiences, and ultimately build your legacy — and we use AI to help you along the way. Thanks everyone for showing up, and we’ll see you next time.