Custom Outlines
Structure your content, your way
What is it?
Define a custom outline to control the structure of your article - this will help you dictate the format and length of your content, as well as the direction that the AI will take when writing.
How do I use it?
This is an experimental feature so please enable experimental features first.
To open the "Outline Editor" panel for any article, click "Configure" under the Outline column:
The Outline Editor allows you to define your outline using markdown syntax.
The Markdown Editor on the left, allows you to type or paste your outline, while the Preview panel on the right allows you to visualize what the structure of your article will look like:
The Markdown Editor supports only H2, H3 and H4 headings, so you can define hierarchies that are up to 3 levels deep. The editor will ignore all lines that are not markdown headers, so you can safely paste other text into the editor without breaking anything.
Pro tip: Pasting any markdown text, including a whole article - will extract the outline 😉
When you're done:
Clicking "Save" will save the saniitized/cleansed markdown outline and close the popup.
Clicking "Cancel" will reset back to the original and close the popup.
Examples
Below is an example of some outlines:
Machined will generate AI content for each section so the length of the article will differ based on the length of the outline, there's no current way to dictate the length of each section (but a good estimation is that for an average H2 containing 3x H3s, you will generate on average 400 words).
Known issues
Custom Outlines is still an experimental features, below is a list of known issues to be aware of.
Regarding Research
At the moment, Machined will only perform research for the whole article on the topic level, it will not research every heading. This means that there is a chance that you might inadvertently introduce errors and hallucinations into the content by mentioning something that Machined doesn't have context on.
For example, if you write an article about "the best car brands" and one of your headings includes "Lada" - it is likely that the research feature will not have any context that is Lada related.
We're working to update the research feature to include all headings - we'll keep you posted
Regarding Humanizer
The Machined Humanizer is a pretty advanced agent-based post-processing step. When humanizing an article, it might decide to rewrite the headings you provide on your custom outline. The structure and length of the outline should remain the same, but the words used in the headings might be changed.
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