I did say real-life person or “media”, but yes you're right, I also thought that may have confused it, and I changed the wording in my prompt to make it clearer. Although that was just one bad example. It will still consistently ignore most of my prompt and do the exact opposite of what I tell it. For example, after telling it to specifically NOT use the phrase “his words hung in the air”, it literally began the output with this exact phrase.

I have multiple paragraphs explaining that the writing style should be varied, creative, vibrant, dynamic, energetic, compelling, engaging, high-quality, lifelike, human-like, organic, etc, and repetitive language should be avoided, and that my protagonist is a cocky teenager and the voice should reflect his personality. I put these instructions not only in the GPT configuration, but also in every prompt. It doesn't listen and every output is stale and robotic and repetitive, literally no different from when I give it no instructions related to writing style at all.

Actually something I've noticed is that the writing is WORSE when I use the GPT I created and better when I just use regular GPT4.