Drafting a post from a brief
Drafting from a brief is one control: the Generate tab of the shared AI popup, opened from the post composer. It is the same tab on all three engines and it spends the same allowance — but each engine sends the model different context alongside your brief, so the same brief produces a different draft in each.
| Open it with | Where | What it knows besides your brief |
|---|---|---|
| Write with AI | A Cross-Promotion campaign | Your channel and your partner's channel — title, handle, description, subscribers |
| Draft with AI | Paid Promotions → Book a placement | That channel's own posting rules: links allowed or not, whether the owner asks posts to be marked as sponsored, and the prohibited-topics list |
| Write my ad with AI | Subscriber Exchange → ad builder | Nothing. Your brief is the whole input — the topic you picked for the ad is not sent |
Tone and length are already fixed in the prompt behind the tab, so the brief is best spent on facts rather than on styling instructions.
Before you start
- Signed in, on any plan. Drafting is available on every rung including Free — subject to your allowance.
- For a cross-promotion: a confirmed campaign with a partner attached, and your channel on it.
- For Paid Promotions: the advertiser side of the marketplace and a listing open. The button is not drawn until a channel is loaded, because the draft is written against that channel's rules.
- For the Subscriber Exchange: an enrolled channel and an ad in progress.
- A brief. The dialog will not run on fewer than three characters, on any engine. Paid Promotions and the Subscriber Exchange then refuse again on the server below six, with different wording. A cross-promotion has no server floor at all — it has both channels' facts to work from — but the dialog's three still apply, so you always type something.
Step by step
The flow is identical everywhere. Only the name on the button changes.
- Open the composer and press its AI button — Write with AI on a campaign, Draft with AI on a booking, Write my ad with AI in the exchange builder.
- Stay on the Generate tab and type into What should the post say? The field accepts 600 characters; how many reach the model depends on the engine — 300 on a cross-promotion, 400 on the other two — so put the steer first.
- Press Generate. The status line reads Writing…
- Read the Preview. Your post is still untouched; the status line says so.
- Press Apply to my post to accept it, or Regenerate for another attempt at the cost of another action.
- Edit the draft in the composer, then save it: Save post on a campaign, Continue in the exchange builder, Add to cart on a booking.
The Generate tab never touches your post in the background. If you already have copy you want to keep, generate anyway and compare in the preview — closing the dialog leaves your post exactly as it was. On a cross-promotion, Refine is the better tool for copy that already exists.
On a booking, applying a draft re-runs the channel's pre-flight against it automatically. Read the rows underneath before you add the placement to your cart — a draft written against the rules can still trip one.
Writing a brief the model can use
The brief is short — 300 to 400 characters reach the model depending on the engine — so spend it on the things a model cannot guess.
| Put in | Leave out |
|---|---|
| What the channel or product actually is | Adjectives about how great it is |
| Who it is for, in plain words | Instructions about tone or length; they are already in the prompt |
| The one action you want a reader to take | Your own draft copy — that is what Refine is for |
| A fact worth leading with, if you have one | Numbers you are not certain of |
| For Paid Promotions: anything the channel's rules already forbid | Requests to break those rules; the pre-flight will catch it anyway |
A daily book-recommendations channel for people who want one good non-fiction pick a week produces a far better first draft than the best books channel on Telegram. The first tells the model who is reading; the second only tells it you are enthusiastic.
What the draft will and will not contain
Every drafting prompt carries the same standing instructions:
- One post, finished. No preamble, no options, no explanation — just the text.
- A hook, the offer and a call to action, native to Telegram.
- No invented facts. The model is told never to make up statistics, prices or guarantees. It can still be wrong about your product, which is why you edit it.
- No Markdown, and no formatting either. A Generate draft arrives as plain words on all three engines. Bold, italic and links are yours to add in the editor afterwards. (Refine, on a cross-promotion, does hand formatting back.)
- Length. An exchange draft is aimed at roughly 400 characters; a cross-promotion draft is only told to be short; a Paid Promotions draft is aimed at about 600. Paid Promotions also refuses outright a reply longer than Telegram's 1,024-character caption limit — you see Couldn't draft that just now — no action was used rather than a post cut off mid-sentence.
- The attribution reserve is not part of the brief. The composer's counter usually stops 33 characters short of the caption limit, but the model is not told about that. A long draft can land already over the counter; trim it before you submit. See the reserve.
On a booking, the listing's own rules are stated to the model: whether links are allowed at all, whether the owner asks posts to be marked as sponsored, and their prohibited topics. This is also why the button does not exist until a channel is loaded — there is no such thing as a channel-less draft here.
One consequence to know about: when the owner has asked for sponsored marking, the prompt still asks the model to include a #ad hashtag, even though Onflow Ads now labels every placement it delivers itself. If your draft comes back with #ad in it and you would rather it were not there, delete it — the pre-flight does not ask you for one.
Passing through the AI is not the same as passing the channel's pre-flight, and neither is the same as the owner accepting the booking. A draft written against the rules can still trip a rule; run the pre-flight and read every row before you pay.
What it costs
One text action per attempt, on every engine. Regenerate costs another. A failure costs nothing: an outage or an empty result hands the action back and says no action was used.
The rule-based content check that declines an abusive prompt for free runs on your Generate brief too, on every engine — a brief for a casino or an adult channel is declined before anything is spent. What the model writes back is checked as well: a draft that breaks the prohibited list is withheld and the action handed back. The content rules still govern what you publish, and the pre-flight, the owner and the platform rules are all downstream of the draft.
See AI quotas and limits.
If something goes wrong
| What you see | What it means | What to do |
|---|---|---|
| Tell the AI what the post is about first. | The brief is under three characters. This is the dialog's own check, on every engine | Type a brief and press Generate again |
| Describe the ad you want, and I'll draft it. | The Paid Promotions brief cleared three characters but is under six | Write a sentence, not a word |
| Describe the channel or offer you're promoting. | The Subscriber Exchange brief is under six characters | Same — one sentence is enough |
| Have a look. Nothing changes until you apply it. | Success. The draft is in the preview | Read it, then Apply to my post |
| Couldn't draft that just now — no action was used. | The model returned nothing, or a Paid Promotions draft came back over the caption limit | Retry. Your allowance was not charged |
| You've used today's AI actions. or You've used this month's AI actions. (with the reset time) | Your daily or your monthly text allowance is finished — the message names which | The dialog shows the message and refreshes its meters. See AI quotas and limits |
| Too many attempts. Please wait a minute and try again. | You hit the burst limit, not your allowance | Wait and retry. Nothing was spent |
| AI is paused on your account while a review is open. | A review is open on your account | It returns automatically when the review resolves |
Related
- The AI composer popup — the dialog that holds the Generate tab.
- Refining copy you already have — the safer choice when a draft already exists.
- AI in the booking composer — drafting inside the full Paid Promotions workflow.
- Running ads — the Subscriber Exchange ad builder the popup sits in.