4 ms·

GPT-3 writing tool that generates surprisingly compelling characters/plot twists

51 points by eliotpeper 6y ago

minimaxir 6y ago
This app doesn't adequately disclose that it's using GPT-3/OpenAI API, therefore making the "our magical writing AI" subheader patently false. The lack of transparency is going to be a continual problem with these kinds of apps, one I've tried to encourage with my own text-generating apps with only mild success.
- _red 6y ago
  Well "OpenAI" is itself a bait-and-switch of a name (nothing open about it). So, it fits.
- dylanpyle 6y ago
  Agreed, this is impressive but the base results from GPT-3 when given a creative prompt are super impressive on their own. Here's an example with zero additional prompt design using one of the same introductory sentences: https://gist.github.com/dylanpyle/b9ed1d7e26ed6e6247a0bf92908b66a5 https://gist.github.com/dylanpyle/b9ed1d7e26ed6e6247a0bf9290...
- superamit 6y ago
  Hey Max! Sudowrite co-founder here. We didn't leave out GPT-3 to deceive and will probably include it in the FAQ we're putting together. Our reasoning to leave it out initially was more about getting the right audience for our beta test: - Most people outside the tech world (our intended audience is fiction writers at this point) haven't yet heard of GPT-3, so we didn't want to confuse them. - There's been a problem where people who want to try out GPT-3 try to get access to it through apps that use it. AI Dungeon deals with this a lot. OpenAI discourages direct user access to the prompt, and we've scaled back some of our features already to prevent unfettered access. I agree it's a little confusing; I'd want to know what was powering the tool myself. Hopefully as OpenAI opens up access we can be a little more open as well.
  - fpgaminer 6y ago
    > There's been a problem where people who want to try out GPT-3 try to get access to it through apps that use it. AI Dungeon deals with this a lot. OpenAI discourages direct user access to the prompt, and we've scaled back some of our features already to prevent unfettered access. I find this incredibly frustrating as a user (of AI Dungeon at least). I'm always left wondering if my experience is being crippled by OpenAI's draconian requirement. Hopefully they relax that in the future once the API is out of beta.
katmannthree 6y ago
> We believe AI can unleash our creative potential. Seems a little ironic given that the rest of the page is about using the creative potential of AI to lead the human in a direction it didn’t see.
- jeeceebees 6y ago
  I think most human creativity is built around a seed of inspiration from outside sources. In my experience serendipity and happy accidents are exactly what leads to the most creative and interesting outcomes. This is a system that’s able to generate these inspirations/prompts for you in a way that’s more focused on what you’ve already written. I don’t see it as ironic because I don’t think it’s hijacking your creative potential, just augmenting it.
wombatmobile 6y ago
This example speaks for itself (please leave a comment if your jaw drops). > Rohit took a tentative step out of Indira Gandhi International just as a drone sliced through the space above his head, dispersing an aromatic mist. The summer night was hot, thick, and wet.
- minimaxir 6y ago
  As always with AI-generated text, be aware that any curated demos are very likely cherry-picked.
  - rationalfaith 6y ago
    Indeed! It's statistical models getting touted as a panacea.
- superamit 6y ago
  Hey there, Sudowrite cofounder here. Just as clarification, this example is human written text (I wrote it!) When you click "Open Wormhole", you'll see the output from Sudowrite offering different directions you could go from this start.
  - andersco 6y ago
    When arriving at the site I thought what I saw had been written by sudowrite - you really should make clear what has been written by a human.
- ForHackernews 6y ago
  That's a prompt written by a human. But 'through the wormhole' I found this snippet that reads like a Black Mirror episode guest-written by Thomas Friedman.[0] > The drone broke into four units, zipped around him, and whirred away. "He was escorted by a drone, a robot, the whole way," his father told me a few months later. "It was very Indian. It was very on-the-ground. That's the vision of India." [0] - https://delong.typepad.com/egregious_moderation/2009/01/matt-taibbi-flathead-the-peculiar-genius-of-thomas-l-friedman.html https://delong.typepad.com/egregious_moderation/2009/01/matt...
elliotpage 6y ago
This strongly falls under the realm of "so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should" for me. At a time when writing is being undervalued and turned into "content" grist for the mill, the last thing I want to see is writing guided by an "AI" down the same old pathways.
crazygringo 6y ago
This actually makes me wonder... has anyone actually tried applying deep learning to fiction plots, whether book, film or TV? I assume not, since it would presumably require a kind of manual tagging of plot elements. ("A thinks B did C. B discovers D did E. A finds out about E...") But I can't help but wonder if automatic generation of plot, then characters, then dialog... could actually produce fairly realistic screenplays, at least. (Screenplays, being so compact, would be much easier than novels with their lengthy prose.)
- minimaxir 6y ago
  GPT-3 (and other Transformers-based models) do a surprisingly-good job at maintaining entity relationships over a long horizon, thanks to attention mechanisms.
- unoti 6y ago
  I did something sort of similar, but really most similar to the "manual tagging" you described... I wrote an "Excuse Generator" that takes the form of "I wanted to do ___ but didn't because __ and I feel terrible about that because ___". The actual code takes a few more randomized turns in the structure than that, but ends of making some stuff that amazed me. Code: https://github.com/unoti/gpt2-excuse-generator https://github.com/unoti/gpt2-excuse-generator
- TheOtherHobbes 6y ago
  There isn't a symbolic representation of plot semantics. No one cares that A thinks B, they care why A thinks B - and they care even more about what it might mean for what happens next. Plots aren't a series of events, they're a series of motivational challenges for the characters. The heart of a plot is how they respond to the challenges, and a good plot has a consistent theme which develops a coherent series of related challenges through superficially different events. The mechanical specifics of the challenges are almost secondary.
  - crazygringo 6y ago
    I've done a fair bit of screenwriting, including taking classes in it, and that's really not the case at all. You're confusing plot with other things. Plot literally does boil down telling a story in beats where each beat is essentially a character wants something, tries to get it, and either succeeds or fails. String together 80 of these and you've got a film. Now obviously there is much more to writing, like character (which is what you're describing), tests of character, etc. Which is why I talked about plot and character and dialog. But plot really is just "a series of events" that needs to be sequenced very carefully. Which is an important lesson for writers to learn, because beginning writers often focus entirely on character and motivation, and neglect plot mechanics, which makes for a boring, meandering, not-compelling-at-all screenplay.
WillDaSilva 6y ago
This is exciting to see. In the start AIs will be used as assistants to human writers, but I imagine that in the future they'll progress to the point where they're able to write on their own with little to no human intervention. If programs can author books/screenplays/etc. for free, that's going to revolutionize the world of fiction. I don't think we need to get to the point of AGI to see bots that can hold their own against human authors.
- jdm2212 6y ago
  To get a real story you need AGI that has some understanding of what it's writing about. What GPT-3 churns out is really just pleasant prose about a theme, but it's meaningless/directionless and won't make sense beyond individual paragraphs. It doesn't really make sense within paragraph either, but we're able to read meaning into any string of five or six sentences so it doesn't jump out as much.
  - WillDaSilva 6y ago
    I'm not claiming that this is something that GPT-3 could ever accomplish, but I do believe there exists a middle ground between GPT-3 and full AGI that can produce creative works such as fiction novels.
    - jdm2212 6y ago
      Writing a novel that holds together requires a coherent model of how the world works, and if you've got that you've basically got AGI. An AI author that can write a compelling account of a person or institution's behavior over a non-trivial period of time could also serve as a real person's manager and have a conversation with a real person.
aerovistae 6y ago
The Great Automatic Grammatizator, by Roald Dahl, one of the best sci fi short stories ever. This post is the story come to life. https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=http://bookophile.weebly.com/uploads/6/4/0/8/6408830/the_great_automatic_grammatizator_and_ot_-_roald_dahl.pdf&ved=2ahUKEwjdtqvm4ZjrAhWHecAKHc35CD0QFjAAegQIAxAB&usg=AOvVaw1bptkvU0zYxrc6gpVjx2rX https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=http://...
techbio 6y ago
Can we start it off with "Call me Ishmael" and see if it mentions typewriters in the next 700 pages?
rationalfaith 6y ago
Wait till we find out that most of this is plagiarized from the data ingested by the model (no surprise!)
mywittyname 6y ago
This doesn't really show it in action. First off, the automatic scrolling over two separate panels makes it difficult to read the story. Additionally, the page looks to be a few static snippets, instead of dynamically generated and unique to each user. That makes me suspect that these are probably cherry-picked examples.
- jamesjyu 6y ago
  Hey there, Sudowrite founder here. We're building on GPT-3, and the OpenAI is still early, so we aren't allowed to give public access just yet. So yes, these are static snippets for now. But the quality is on par with average results from Sudowrite.
soneca 6y ago
I have a problem with procedural games in that whenever I face something new, I know it is not the process of a human creative mind. There wasn’t any intention behind that creation, there were no conscious or subconscious decisions about what that was supposed to mean, there was no human bias, no human tropes. Essentially, for me, there was no story. I lack any more understanding of the world, the humans, or the society for encountering that piece of creation. It is empty for me. Meaningless. A parade of random dice rolls thrown by a machine carefully designed to be misinterpreted as a story. I feel the same about a story written by GPT-3. Or AI music creation. To make myself clear, I think there is more depth in any superficial pop song composed by humans with the only purpose of earning money based in tried and tired formulas than it is ever possible to achieve in any music ever created by an AI.
- colordrops 6y ago
  For now.
- lordnacho 6y ago
  So, suppose it were possible to simulate a brain. Say someone in the future figures out how brains work, and boils it down to some physical processes to do with neurons and synapses. Ed Sheeran is then scanned, and a battery of machines produces new music from the patterns in his brain. What do you think of that? For me, it seems the creative process must be informational. It's something to do with mixing up experienced life, ideas, cultural tropes, etc. But in being informational, it's also not specific to the first substrate that generated it. In fact you have the luxury of being able to "run the code" on new substrates, and that creates a new economics of what is considered good.
- ipnon 6y ago
  I'm also fascinated by the application of AI like GPT-3 to generating video game content. The best content will come from game developers working with GPT-3, where GPT-3 comes up with characters and subplots without exhaustion, and the game developer filters the generated leads for ideas that stand on their own and ideas that invite more exploration. It seems reasonable for game developers to be able to generate an order of magnitude more NPCs using this method. The game director can pour their heart and soul into the main storyline, and the assistants can create hundreds of hours of less original but still sufficient content. I imagine being able to create DLC after the initial release at a rate that exceeds any players ability to finish the latest release before the next comes out.
weeksie 6y ago
I don't think "generate a writing prompt" is a problem that people have. Great for exercises perhaps, but if you can't generate your own ideas, picking one at random isn't going to help. Mad Libs are fun though and they tend to be funny because they're surprising and often absurd. These kinds of things are great for people who fancy they might become a writer one day. It's the same as obsessing over your editor or your outline method. Nothing's going to write your story for you but a lot of "tools" are available to grant yourself the illusion of progress.
ImprobableTruth 6y ago
Does anyone have a good estimate what the costs for this would be? I feel like affordability might be the make or break, since the compute cost can't be that cheap, but I think it's doubtful whether the results would be worth paying a premium.
darepublic 6y ago
What I hope/expect to see in the next 10 or so years are triple A game titles similar to GTAV, that start off with a set of characters and a situation/problem, but let things develop organically from there. Not to mention realistic dialogue / realistic reactions from characters to dynamically unfolding story.
- Exuma 6y ago
  At one point I would think this is insane, but if they can get the "context" stuff working a little better I feel this would be insane... and somewhat plausible. I suppose you'd have to tie 3d models to the story though, that might be difficult.
- tolbish 6y ago
  Now that is a true virtual reality!
dschuetz 6y ago
I believe Dwarf Fortress history generation algorithm is able to create fantasy history records that rival authored ones.
hirundo 6y ago
There's a scene in Robert Heinlein's Number of the Beast where his self-similar author character, Jubal Harshaw, dictates the first line of a story to a secretary, who happens to be an AI. While he's having a conversation, she finishes the story -- in his voice. Heinlein can't be the only author to have that dream. Sudowrite seems like a step toward fulfilling it.

51 points by eliotpeper 6y ago

This app doesn't adequately disclose that it's using GPT-3/OpenAI API, therefore making the "our magical writing AI" subheader patently false. The lack of transparency is going to be a continual problem with these kinds of apps, one I've tried to encourage with my own text-generating apps with only mild success.

_red 6y ago
Well "OpenAI" is itself a bait-and-switch of a name (nothing open about it). So, it fits.
dylanpyle 6y ago
Agreed, this is impressive but the base results from GPT-3 when given a creative prompt are super impressive on their own. Here's an example with zero additional prompt design using one of the same introductory sentences: https://gist.github.com/dylanpyle/b9ed1d7e26ed6e6247a0bf92908b66a5 https://gist.github.com/dylanpyle/b9ed1d7e26ed6e6247a0bf9290...
superamit 6y ago
Hey Max! Sudowrite co-founder here. We didn't leave out GPT-3 to deceive and will probably include it in the FAQ we're putting together. Our reasoning to leave it out initially was more about getting the right audience for our beta test: - Most people outside the tech world (our intended audience is fiction writers at this point) haven't yet heard of GPT-3, so we didn't want to confuse them. - There's been a problem where people who want to try out GPT-3 try to get access to it through apps that use it. AI Dungeon deals with this a lot. OpenAI discourages direct user access to the prompt, and we've scaled back some of our features already to prevent unfettered access. I agree it's a little confusing; I'd want to know what was powering the tool myself. Hopefully as OpenAI opens up access we can be a little more open as well.
- fpgaminer 6y ago
  > There's been a problem where people who want to try out GPT-3 try to get access to it through apps that use it. AI Dungeon deals with this a lot. OpenAI discourages direct user access to the prompt, and we've scaled back some of our features already to prevent unfettered access. I find this incredibly frustrating as a user (of AI Dungeon at least). I'm always left wondering if my experience is being crippled by OpenAI's draconian requirement. Hopefully they relax that in the future once the API is out of beta.

katmannthree 6y ago

> We believe AI can unleash our creative potential. Seems a little ironic given that the rest of the page is about using the creative potential of AI to lead the human in a direction it didn’t see.

jeeceebees 6y ago
I think most human creativity is built around a seed of inspiration from outside sources. In my experience serendipity and happy accidents are exactly what leads to the most creative and interesting outcomes. This is a system that’s able to generate these inspirations/prompts for you in a way that’s more focused on what you’ve already written. I don’t see it as ironic because I don’t think it’s hijacking your creative potential, just augmenting it.

wombatmobile 6y ago

This example speaks for itself (please leave a comment if your jaw drops). > Rohit took a tentative step out of Indira Gandhi International just as a drone sliced through the space above his head, dispersing an aromatic mist. The summer night was hot, thick, and wet.

minimaxir 6y ago
As always with AI-generated text, be aware that any curated demos are very likely cherry-picked.
- rationalfaith 6y ago
  Indeed! It's statistical models getting touted as a panacea.
superamit 6y ago
Hey there, Sudowrite cofounder here. Just as clarification, this example is human written text (I wrote it!) When you click "Open Wormhole", you'll see the output from Sudowrite offering different directions you could go from this start.
- andersco 6y ago
  When arriving at the site I thought what I saw had been written by sudowrite - you really should make clear what has been written by a human.
ForHackernews 6y ago
That's a prompt written by a human. But 'through the wormhole' I found this snippet that reads like a Black Mirror episode guest-written by Thomas Friedman.[0] > The drone broke into four units, zipped around him, and whirred away. "He was escorted by a drone, a robot, the whole way," his father told me a few months later. "It was very Indian. It was very on-the-ground. That's the vision of India." [0] - https://delong.typepad.com/egregious_moderation/2009/01/matt-taibbi-flathead-the-peculiar-genius-of-thomas-l-friedman.html https://delong.typepad.com/egregious_moderation/2009/01/matt...

elliotpage 6y ago

This strongly falls under the realm of "so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should" for me. At a time when writing is being undervalued and turned into "content" grist for the mill, the last thing I want to see is writing guided by an "AI" down the same old pathways.

crazygringo 6y ago

This actually makes me wonder... has anyone actually tried applying deep learning to fiction plots, whether book, film or TV? I assume not, since it would presumably require a kind of manual tagging of plot elements. ("A thinks B did C. B discovers D did E. A finds out about E...") But I can't help but wonder if automatic generation of plot, then characters, then dialog... could actually produce fairly realistic screenplays, at least. (Screenplays, being so compact, would be much easier than novels with their lengthy prose.)

minimaxir 6y ago
GPT-3 (and other Transformers-based models) do a surprisingly-good job at maintaining entity relationships over a long horizon, thanks to attention mechanisms.
unoti 6y ago
I did something sort of similar, but really most similar to the "manual tagging" you described... I wrote an "Excuse Generator" that takes the form of "I wanted to do ___ but didn't because __ and I feel terrible about that because ___". The actual code takes a few more randomized turns in the structure than that, but ends of making some stuff that amazed me. Code: https://github.com/unoti/gpt2-excuse-generator https://github.com/unoti/gpt2-excuse-generator
TheOtherHobbes 6y ago
There isn't a symbolic representation of plot semantics. No one cares that A thinks B, they care why A thinks B - and they care even more about what it might mean for what happens next. Plots aren't a series of events, they're a series of motivational challenges for the characters. The heart of a plot is how they respond to the challenges, and a good plot has a consistent theme which develops a coherent series of related challenges through superficially different events. The mechanical specifics of the challenges are almost secondary.
- crazygringo 6y ago
  I've done a fair bit of screenwriting, including taking classes in it, and that's really not the case at all. You're confusing plot with other things. Plot literally does boil down telling a story in beats where each beat is essentially a character wants something, tries to get it, and either succeeds or fails. String together 80 of these and you've got a film. Now obviously there is much more to writing, like character (which is what you're describing), tests of character, etc. Which is why I talked about plot and character and dialog. But plot really is just "a series of events" that needs to be sequenced very carefully. Which is an important lesson for writers to learn, because beginning writers often focus entirely on character and motivation, and neglect plot mechanics, which makes for a boring, meandering, not-compelling-at-all screenplay.

WillDaSilva 6y ago

This is exciting to see. In the start AIs will be used as assistants to human writers, but I imagine that in the future they'll progress to the point where they're able to write on their own with little to no human intervention. If programs can author books/screenplays/etc. for free, that's going to revolutionize the world of fiction. I don't think we need to get to the point of AGI to see bots that can hold their own against human authors.

jdm2212 6y ago
To get a real story you need AGI that has some understanding of what it's writing about. What GPT-3 churns out is really just pleasant prose about a theme, but it's meaningless/directionless and won't make sense beyond individual paragraphs. It doesn't really make sense within paragraph either, but we're able to read meaning into any string of five or six sentences so it doesn't jump out as much.
- WillDaSilva 6y ago
  I'm not claiming that this is something that GPT-3 could ever accomplish, but I do believe there exists a middle ground between GPT-3 and full AGI that can produce creative works such as fiction novels.
  - jdm2212 6y ago
    Writing a novel that holds together requires a coherent model of how the world works, and if you've got that you've basically got AGI. An AI author that can write a compelling account of a person or institution's behavior over a non-trivial period of time could also serve as a real person's manager and have a conversation with a real person.

aerovistae 6y ago

The Great Automatic Grammatizator, by Roald Dahl, one of the best sci fi short stories ever. This post is the story come to life. https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=http://bookophile.weebly.com/uploads/6/4/0/8/6408830/the_great_automatic_grammatizator_and_ot_-_roald_dahl.pdf&ved=2ahUKEwjdtqvm4ZjrAhWHecAKHc35CD0QFjAAegQIAxAB&usg=AOvVaw1bptkvU0zYxrc6gpVjx2rX https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=http://...

techbio 6y ago

Can we start it off with "Call me Ishmael" and see if it mentions typewriters in the next 700 pages?

rationalfaith 6y ago

Wait till we find out that most of this is plagiarized from the data ingested by the model (no surprise!)

mywittyname 6y ago

This doesn't really show it in action. First off, the automatic scrolling over two separate panels makes it difficult to read the story. Additionally, the page looks to be a few static snippets, instead of dynamically generated and unique to each user. That makes me suspect that these are probably cherry-picked examples.

jamesjyu 6y ago
Hey there, Sudowrite founder here. We're building on GPT-3, and the OpenAI is still early, so we aren't allowed to give public access just yet. So yes, these are static snippets for now. But the quality is on par with average results from Sudowrite.

soneca 6y ago

I have a problem with procedural games in that whenever I face something new, I know it is not the process of a human creative mind. There wasn’t any intention behind that creation, there were no conscious or subconscious decisions about what that was supposed to mean, there was no human bias, no human tropes. Essentially, for me, there was no story. I lack any more understanding of the world, the humans, or the society for encountering that piece of creation. It is empty for me. Meaningless. A parade of random dice rolls thrown by a machine carefully designed to be misinterpreted as a story. I feel the same about a story written by GPT-3. Or AI music creation. To make myself clear, I think there is more depth in any superficial pop song composed by humans with the only purpose of earning money based in tried and tired formulas than it is ever possible to achieve in any music ever created by an AI.

colordrops 6y ago
For now.
lordnacho 6y ago
So, suppose it were possible to simulate a brain. Say someone in the future figures out how brains work, and boils it down to some physical processes to do with neurons and synapses. Ed Sheeran is then scanned, and a battery of machines produces new music from the patterns in his brain. What do you think of that? For me, it seems the creative process must be informational. It's something to do with mixing up experienced life, ideas, cultural tropes, etc. But in being informational, it's also not specific to the first substrate that generated it. In fact you have the luxury of being able to "run the code" on new substrates, and that creates a new economics of what is considered good.
ipnon 6y ago
I'm also fascinated by the application of AI like GPT-3 to generating video game content. The best content will come from game developers working with GPT-3, where GPT-3 comes up with characters and subplots without exhaustion, and the game developer filters the generated leads for ideas that stand on their own and ideas that invite more exploration. It seems reasonable for game developers to be able to generate an order of magnitude more NPCs using this method. The game director can pour their heart and soul into the main storyline, and the assistants can create hundreds of hours of less original but still sufficient content. I imagine being able to create DLC after the initial release at a rate that exceeds any players ability to finish the latest release before the next comes out.

weeksie 6y ago

I don't think "generate a writing prompt" is a problem that people have. Great for exercises perhaps, but if you can't generate your own ideas, picking one at random isn't going to help. Mad Libs are fun though and they tend to be funny because they're surprising and often absurd. These kinds of things are great for people who fancy they might become a writer one day. It's the same as obsessing over your editor or your outline method. Nothing's going to write your story for you but a lot of "tools" are available to grant yourself the illusion of progress.

ImprobableTruth 6y ago

Does anyone have a good estimate what the costs for this would be? I feel like affordability might be the make or break, since the compute cost can't be that cheap, but I think it's doubtful whether the results would be worth paying a premium.

darepublic 6y ago

What I hope/expect to see in the next 10 or so years are triple A game titles similar to GTAV, that start off with a set of characters and a situation/problem, but let things develop organically from there. Not to mention realistic dialogue / realistic reactions from characters to dynamically unfolding story.

Exuma 6y ago
At one point I would think this is insane, but if they can get the "context" stuff working a little better I feel this would be insane... and somewhat plausible. I suppose you'd have to tie 3d models to the story though, that might be difficult.
tolbish 6y ago
Now that is a true virtual reality!

dschuetz 6y ago

I believe Dwarf Fortress history generation algorithm is able to create fantasy history records that rival authored ones.

hirundo 6y ago

There's a scene in Robert Heinlein's Number of the Beast where his self-similar author character, Jubal Harshaw, dictates the first line of a story to a secretary, who happens to be an AI. While he's having a conversation, she finishes the story -- in his voice. Heinlein can't be the only author to have that dream. Sudowrite seems like a step toward fulfilling it.