—Digital Assassin is free this week. See below for details.—
I received quite a few emails regarding my last newsletter on editing software. That encouraged me to write another one about a different kind of writing program, since it appears to be topic of some resonance. I recently tried the trial version of Sudowrite, an artificial intelligence writing system.
The idea of using AI to write, or at least help write, books and other things has been around a while. Sudowrite is a company that uses GPT-3, a system developed by a non-profit called Open-AI, which has received massive funding to create a super computer that can . . . well, write novels. Sort of.
Sudowrite gained widespread publicity earlier this year when Stephen Marche wrote a piece for The New Yorker. In it, Marche copied the first half of Kafke’s “The Metamorphosis” and clicked the wormhole button in Sudowrite, allowing it to continue the story. He printed the results in his article. It’s not bad. Click over and judge for yourself.
The fact that the computer-generated portion looks so cogent, and does not overtly seem to be written by a computer, turned a lot of heads in the publishing world. Here was something different, indeed. It was even better than previous versions using GPT-2.
Sudowrite offers different styles of writing, and multiple suggestions per sample. Marche’s article goes through them and shows how the results of the generated text will differ. He used it to output poetry as well as prose.
Joanna Penn had an excellent interview with Sudowrite creator Amit Gupta. In it, Gupta explained how the software might not actually write an entire book, but it could offer suggestions and ideas, serving as another “person” to help authors generate content. In the podcast, they touched on issues of copyright and efforts to avoid inadvertent plagiarism as well.
I signed up for the trial version of Sudowrite and gave it a go. I can say it is quite remarkable. It delivers content just as Gupta promises. You do have to feed it something for the software to go on. With my Kindle Vella space opera, ParaDiv Ops, I pasted in 1,000 words or so of an episode that had me stumped, pasting it into the browser window open at Sudowrite. The text offered by the software was not usable, but the ideas it generated helped break the logjam, so to speak. I agree with Gupta that the program is very useful for overcoming writer’s block.
Sudowrite needs initial information for character names and settings, then offers different suggestions based on mood or style. With the “Wormhole” option, Sudowrite offers a choice of different arcs your story can take.
The software also offers a character generator which I didn’t try. I enjoy my characters too much to have someone or something else create them for me.
I feel very positive about Sudowrite. I think it has the potential to assist writers, especially those who need ideas at any given moment. I don’t think it completely replaces the writer, we’re a ways off from that yet, and I’m sure Gupta agrees based on his conversation with Penn. But it certainly can help them, if only in a “cafeteria-style. pick and choose which pieces you want” sort of way. You can check out the beta for yourself at sudowrite.com.
In other news, this week the first book in the Pirates of the Milky Way series is complimentary on Amazon for a limited time. Download Digital Assassin for free until Saturday, Nov. 6.
Until next time, happy reading.
JR