Christmas Eve 2022, and the first holiday cards written with a chatbot

There's no big AI headline for December 24, 2022. I looked. No launches, no papers worth a story, no executives saying anything new. It was Christmas Eve, and the record is quiet.

What was going on, though, was easy to guess. ChatGPT had come out on November 30, and by Wikipedia's count it picked up a million users in its first five days. So this was the first holiday season where a lot of ordinary people had a free chatbot sitting in a browser tab. Some of them, staring at a blank card at 11 p.m., surely typed "write a Christmas message for my aunt."

And what came back probably sounded like a greeting card aisle.

Why the first draft sounds like nobody

Ask a chatbot for a holiday message with no other information and it gives you the average of every holiday message it has seen. Warm wishes, joy and peace, the new year ahead. Nothing in it is wrong. Nothing in it is you, either, and the person reading it can tell. Your aunt has heard "wishing you joy and peace this season" from a bank.

The model isn't being lazy. It just doesn't know you, so it writes for everyone. The fix is to stop asking it to invent your voice and start showing it your voice.

Show it how you actually talk

The best input you can give is something you wrote yourself. An old card. A text to the same person. Even two sentences is enough to change everything.

Before:
Write a Christmas message for my aunt.

After:
Help me write a short Christmas message to my aunt Dina.
Here's a text I sent her last month, so you can match how I
talk to her: "lol you were right about the lasagna, it was
better the second day. call me sunday?"
Keep it under 60 words. Mention that I'm sorry I missed
Thanksgiving and that I still use the blue scarf she knit me.
No "joy and peace," no "season's greetings."

Look at what the second version gives the model. Who it's for. A real sample of the voice. Two specific details. And a short list of phrases to avoid, which matters more than you'd think, because those stock lines are exactly where the model drifts when it's unsure.