How to Create Lifelike Characters with AI

creating characters is a lot of work and for authors to truly flesh them out you've got to create a character Arc you've got to create backstory for this character you've got to add all sorts of different things to make them feel well-rounded you have to make sure you know their physical appearance their personality you need to make sure their dialogue sounds consistent and uh unique from all of the other characters out there and a lot of authors especially authors just starting out kind of skim over this section because too much work for the value that

you get out of it and yet if you can go deep on these characters and really understand them then you're going to have a much better time of actually using those characters inside of your novel and making them feel more unique and not just a generic copy paste character all throughout your book and in this video I'm going to show you a couple of incredible ways that you can use AI to really speed up that process for you whether you use AI in your writing or not this use of AI will actually help you really

save time while still getting that really well fleshed out understanding of your character and if you do use AI I'll show you some additional techniques that will allow you to use these characters effectively in your AI writing and then at the end I'm going to give you a really awesome little bonus on how to actually interact with these characters with AI and really understand like is the voice of this character kind of voice that I want for my [Music] character but first who am I to talk about this well my name is Jason and for

a long time I used to work at Kindle preneur and I actually wrote this blog post here about creating a character profile and this blog post gets into a lot of detail about all of the different things that you want to see in your character so everything from character types uh The Superficial details so physical attributes Etc then the personality the backstory everything and I actually took this and I condensed it into a prompt I worked at Kindle prur for a number of years before full going full-time on this channel and I've written 14 plus

books with with more coming out all the time so I have a decent handle on how to do this a lot of the content that you'll see on YouTube are from people especially AI videos that people who really clearly don't understand what they're doing um but just just to give you an idea that I do have a good sense of what makes a good character profile so what I did is I took this blog post and I basically condensed it into one giant amazing prompt which you can see here in my notion Library uh this

is the prompt right here I won't read the whole thing but it starts out you are an expert at crafting a well-rounded dynamic characters uh we're going to create a character profile for the and then you can select protagonist an an Agonist Mentor you know what whoever your character is of my and then you insert the genre here so I write a lot of fantasy you can put fantasy you can put romance you know whatever you want to do the finished profile should be 1500 words long it's not really going to be 1500 words long

but I'm just giving it a sense of the scope of how big I want this profile to be so it doesn't like skip anything uh here's what I know so far about the character and this is where you insert any details that you already know about your character here now if you don't have a whole lot of information about your character yet you can just leave that blank uh but usually you want to give it something to go on so that it has that to work off of and then I say with that information in

mind build a character profile that includes highly detailed information on the following and we start walking through everything that I put here so we have basic details we have clothing and style we have communications and mannerisms we have psychological profile so this is things like what is their uh like their literal psychological profiles on things like Miles Briggs or anagram and stuff like that Clifton strengths uh one of their motivations fears what's their family situation what's their lifestyle situation and their history what's their backstory so and we're going to go to any standard AI chatbot

uh for instance chat gbt that we have here it's probably the most popular but you could use this with Claude Gemini any number of the other chat Bots out there we're just going to paste this thing in here and let's give it a couple of details so first of all let's make sure that this is the protagonist and let's give it a genre of uh let's just say sweet romance okay the Finish profile should be 1500 words long here's what I know so far about the character so let's just say her name is uh Stacy

and she's from a small town in Arkansas she gets nervous easily and isn't really looking for true love she's more interested in her studies at College which is at uh Penn State uh all of that together you know that that's not a whole lot I was just coming up with that on the top of my head uh but we're now it's going to be able to take that and really flesh it out even further so let's go ahead and run this prompt and see what it gives us first of all it gave us a last

name so we have Stacy Harper our ages 20 that's a good extrapolation given that I mentioned she's in college and it's just getting a lot more specific in a lot of these details so marital status single right height 54 weight 120 lb slim with slightly athletic build skin color light olive eye color Hazel for some reason AI really loves the eye color of Hazel so I would maybe change this um but you could you know keep on going so for her Communications and mannerisms like well she's not from a foreign land her postures generally relaxed

but can be stiff when nervous Twirls a strand of hair around her finger when anxious we go down to the psychological profile we have find out she's isfj u meaning introverted sensing feeling judging uh that seems appropriate she's a type six anagram her top Clift and strengths her responsibility Harmony consistency relator and learner and uh she has anxiety as far as mental disabilities go all of this stuff really goes a long way in fleshing out this character now you might not like all of these things I have actually found that the AI does a really

good job of fleshing out the details in ways that I think yeah that that makes sense I'm okay with that uh but you may find you know for instance the eye color uh Hazel you might find that that's really not something you want uh so you could switch this to a light brown or to blue or whatever you you feel is appro apprpriate uh you can change any of this but this is just sort of a productivity tool this prompt to really get it as close to a fully fleshed out finished product as soon as

you can so that you can then go through and edit it to your heart's content with the understanding that it would have taken you forever to actually go through this and flesh it out yourself you've just saved a whole lot of time it's much easier to edit this thing as it gives it to you than it is to come up with all of this stuff on the spot also saves you a whole lot of headache because you don't have to just like constantly be making all of those decisions and getting decision fatigue and all of

that so this is a fantastic way to flesh out all of your characters very quickly let's move on though and let's just say that you actually wanted to take this character and actually write with AI using this character if you want to do that there are a couple of additional steps that we're going to have to take see if you're writing with AI and you are just not putting any information about the characters into the AI it's going to write each of the characters pretty much the same way a similar problem that most authors have

as well as every character sounding the same with or without AI we want to make sure that the character sound unique and different from each other and so I'm going to show you a way that you can do this in two different software so depending on which software you use uh the first thing that we want to do is boil this down to a smaller more concise paragraph one that focuses especially on the physical description as well as on their ways of communication and dialogue and their personality traits those are going to be the most

important for the AI to understand in order to write the character differently from other characters and so usually what I'll do is I'll take this big profile that it gave us and I'll say something to the effect of now summarize this profile into one paragraph focusing especially on the physical description communication and dialogue habits and personality traits and I let that go and now it's going to summarize everything into one major sentence so now it has summarized everything into one paragraph and this is the kind of thing that we want so everything that we have

in this paragraph is the these are the most important elements for the AI to understand uh we have just the basics you know she's 20-year-old College Jor uh she's 54 the slim athletic build hazel eyes you could of course change that to blue eyes or brown eyes or whatever you want chestnut brown hair usually worn in a loose ponytail State and she has a heart-shaped face so we're getting like her physical description here which is important for the AI to understand she has a small scar an Etc she's an introverted and anxious individual often fidgets

with her hair and struggles with eye contact preferring soft musical giggles and a neat small handwriting she wears casual comfortable clothing and minimal jewelry maintaining a neat appearance academically driven and passionate about Environmental Conservation she values kindness sustainability and Harmony despite her anxiety she is determined to excel in her studies and make a positive impact on the world while balancing her personal happiness and building confidence so this is a a great start now you're going to probably want to edit this a little bit to make sure it's uh you know higher quality I find that

editing out some of the more sappy details is going to help you in the long run when you get into the actual writing with AI so removing some of these things like despite her anxiety she is determined to excel in her studies that's the sort of thing that gets a little sappy a little like over the top so I would maybe edit that out or just phrase it differently I would also add some more information about her dialogue and speech patterns and things like that because that's something that will make a much bigger difference when

you are later writing with AI but let's just say we're okay with this all we have to do is copy it and then I'm going to show you how to do this in two different AI software programs novel crafter and pseudo write let's do novel crafter first so novel crafter is my personal favorite writing program with AI although pseudo is pretty great too um you can write different things down here but one of the great things about novel crafter is that it has over here this thing called the Codex on over here on the left

and all you have to do is create a new entry hit character and we'll call this character Stacy and paste the information into there now you might also want to add some aliases and nicknames so we'll call her Stacy Harper is another nickname or just Harper uh and this is just to Clue the AI in like this is the character that that we mean when we say Stacy Harper or Stacy um and so add that in there then the AI is going to recognize that Stacy's in that scene and when it prompts the AI on

the back end because all of these software are doing a lot of backend prompting it will take this character and all of this information about the character include it in the prompt so that the AI knows that this character is in the scene and therefore has an understanding of how to write that character in a unique way from all of the other characters and as you get more characters like you see in this example I've got several characters here um this is for the uh book written with just prompts project that I've been doing in

my live streams all of these characters have different things and each of these characters going is going to sound somewhat unique uh when when you actually get into to writing with them now if we go into pseudo write it's a very similar process uh when you are into pseudo write and you're into a major project down here in the uh bottom left you'll see this place for characters you just click on that and you'll be brought to this section and all you have to do is say add character and you can add information about the

character here so you can add uh you can get a little more specific here if you want understand it's not going to make too much of a difference but you can put like so her pronouns are she her you can spell specify if she's part of any groups and then there isn't like a main box for everything that you would want to put here uh so you would have to take what chaty BT gave you and divide it up into different things so we would take all of this stuff here about her physical description copy

that go into pite and paste it under physical description go back to check GPT say okay so she's introverted and anxious so we could you know add all of the stuff about the personality paste it here if we want wanted to add more information about the background or dialogue style you could do it here and then um the this works in the same way as novel crafter where as you are writing it's going to be pulling in this information whenever Stacy is in the scene so that it understands exactly how uh she works for this

particular instance and this is great because it allows that character to have a unique voice if you're using AI to write it now I want to end with this uh really cool exercise that you can do because what if the voice isn't quite what you want it to be uh or what if you even if you use AI what if you want to actually interact with the character a little bit and maybe gain some additional insights to the character that you wouldn't have known before so what I would do is if you're in the same

chat window so we're here in chat gbt all you have to do is say I would like you to behave as if you were Stacy and I will be interviewing you can you do that and Chad gbt says sure I'd be happy to roleplay a Stacy for your interview go ahead and ask your question and so I would just say something something like how has your first few days at College gone how have your first few days at College gone oh hi well my first few days at College have been a mix of excitement and

nerves it's definitely a big change from my small town in Arkansas campus is huge and there's so many people I've focused mostly been focusing on getting settled into my dorm and figuring out where all my classes are everyone here seems really nice though and I'm slowly starting to feel more comfortable my classes are interesting especially the ones related to environmental science I just hope I can keep up with everything how about you have you experienced any big changes like this and then you can just keep going and interacting with his characters and maybe actually start

to get some interesting insights into her back story and everything about her now there's another way that you can do this and to do this I'm actually going to go into novel crafter because novel crafter depending on the plan you're on gives you access to this chat um and so if we were to create a new chat right here I would say I would like you to behave like Stacy and I am the interviewer I'm going to add a little bit here to try and get it to sound more natural respond naturally like a real

human with Stacy's backstory and personality wood okay that might enhance the prompt here just a little bit and because I used the name Stacy you'll notice it's underlined here uh just slightly and it turns yellow when I hover over it that's because it is recognizing that the Codex entry I made for Stacy over here uh is being used and so it's now going to pull in that information so that it knows everything about Stacy that it needs to know uh assuming that you have everything in here that you want now we do have this shortened

version of The Prompt here and so there may be things in there that you might want to change or add you might want to add the F the full version of the profile if you want to try that out but I'm just going to go ahead and hit send here and inside of Novel crafter it'll say sure I'd be happy to try that what would you like to ask me and so I'll ask you the same question how have your first few days at College gone um well they've been a a bit overwhelming honestly Penn

State is so much bigger than my high school in Little Rock I've always gotten lost a couple of times already gotten lost a couple of times but I'm starting to figure it out classes are really interesting especially the ones about environmental science so it's kind of giving very similar Vibes here now one of the great things about novel crafter is that if I wanted to uh I'm just going to copy this prompt here we're going to try this again but I'm going to change the model that it is using so uh right now with both

Chad gbt and this example in novel craft after we've been using the model GPT 40 we wanted to change something to like a CLA 3 Opus or CLA 3 Sonet if you want something a little cheaper and then paste this thing in again we're now using a different model so it should sound slightly differently I like CLA 3 Opus I think it's one of the better models out there for creating more realistic sounding Pros uh and here we go hi there I'm Stacy Harper it's nice to meet you I'm a junior at Penn State studying

environmental science what would you like to know about me how have your first few days at college gone and this one's fun because it it's actually giving me some a more visual idea of what she's doing it says takes a deep breath and smiles nervously well it's been quite an adjustment to be honest moving from Little Rock to Penn State was a big change for me the campus is huge and there's so many people to meet it's a bit overwhelming at times especially for someone like me who's a bit introverted and anxious in new situations

so basically it's you know it's running through the same thing and you can just go to town asking all kinds of questions here and really understanding the character better and especially if you write with the AI you may discover that her voice isn't quite right and so you would go here to your uh codex and change something about the information that we have here until it gets to that voice set you're thinking yes that is the character that I want now if you're confused by novel craft or anything here I because it does a lot

of this work for you helps you stay organized so definitely go check it out below and I'll see you in the next video