How to write killer hooks with AI (that don't sound like slop)

I spend most of my time looking for ways to speed up my content workflow.

The problem is, my standard for quality is a 10/10, so most AI writing workflows are a huge waste of time.

Here’s one that isn’t.

When you write video hooks, there are three components that matter:

• The Hook Format - this is the mad-lib structure of the sentence (e.g., The reason [negative outcome] is because you're using the wrong [method/system].)

• The Subject Frame - this is how you frame the subject in the first line

• The Power Phrases - these are the amplifiers for how you drive curiosity around the the pain point, outcome, or objective

Most gurus will tell you to just “copy the winning hooks from other outlier videos.”

And what they mean is that you should take the hook format, keep all the words the same, and swap in your new subject.

But you can immediately see the problem with this.

“Paid ads” as a subject doesn’t make sense in that hook format grammatically. You aren’t trying to “get people addicted to your ads.”

The power word of “addicted” is the wrong word to use in this case.

What you really want to do is find the power words/phrases (e.g., “addicted) from relevant hooks in your category, build a word bank of them, and then swap them interchangeably in proven hook formats you find until the grammar works.

So the real unlock isn’t just the hook formats, it’s the power words.

Here’s how I’ve been solving this with AI…

In Sandcastles, there is a Hooks tab that aggregates all of the hooks from every video you deep analyze (if you set an Automation to just auto analyze the top videos in your watchlist, this will populate for you automatically).

What I can do is Deep Analyze my whole channel in the Videos tab, type my username in the Hooks tab search and then filter by Outlier Score.

This will show me all my best performing hooks in order, in one place.

With a quick scan down the list, I can start to see the power words that are commonly outperforming. Things like “scientifically impossible to skip” and “addicted.”

From here, I can then brainstorm how to remix those power phrases to give myself more options for future videos.

Scientifically impossible to skip can become:

• Psychologically impossible to ignore

• Neurochemically impossible to skip

• Scientifically unskippable

This is how you preserve the proven copywriting psychology but remix with a finer scope to create more options.

Now of course, because Sandcastles is the data layer for social media, you can deep analyze a ton of videos, export the data, drag it into Claude, and ask it to do the following:

• Analyze all of the hooks (by performance) and cluster the best power words/phrases to build a power word bank

• Create 5-10 derivatives of each one that mean the same thing but have a more shockworthy charge

• When I feed you a topic/spoken hook, tweak it by using the proven power words from the word bank

If you want to get fancy, you can even use the Sandcastles MCP in Claude to set up a Scheduled task that runs every morning automatically at 9AM to:

• Automatically ingest and deep analyze any video you post

• Extract the hook and check for power words/phrases

• Add & enhance your power word vault

This would make it so you never even have to log into Sandcastles, you can just check Claude or have it ping you in Slack anytime it finds something noteworthy.

This is how you use social data and the power of AI to make better content faster without building a slop machine.

PS - If you’re looking to build better content systems with AI workflows like this one, this video breaks down my 5 other most used ones (with free Claude skills for each in the description)