AI as a Storyteller

I live in Washington D.C., and this week has been filled with icy rain and hot chocolate. So I thought we could all snuggle up with.. a generative model. Hey — it’s cozier than you think. A few RTX A5500s will warm you better than a Franklin Stove.

This week the theme is storytelling.

I want you to think about writing UX as you read this list. We all know AI assisted writing is going to be ubiquitous, but what form will that relationship take?

Each of the links below offers a slightly different approach to helping you form a story. Some high-level thoughts across the four:

• Is a separate writing app really necessary? (Depends on how purpose your writing is, I think — see the extreme domain specificity of Sudowrite as an example)

• Does AI write the first draft, edit the final draft, or fill the gaps between keyframes? (All of the above, I think — it depends on what you want.)

• Can AI write a good story without human assistance? (For a small child — see BedTimeStory as example — which means we should expect the answer to be “yes, for everyone” within a few years)

• Will AI write my daughter’s college essay? (It’s looking likely, yes, and I think universities are going to be scrambling as early as next year to change how they benchmark applicants)

This week’s links

• Orchard - UX Mechanism: General-purpose prompt macros for highlighted text.
  
  Orchard implements the UX that I think no editor will be without — curated LLM prompts that can help refine any text you highlight. Currently on offer: idea expansion, idea summarization, style transfer, and claim analysis. In this style of AI writing, you’re in control and the AI is like an English major friend sitting next to you.

• Sudowrite - UX Mechanism: Laser-targeted AI wizards for creative writing.
  
  Sudowrite takes in-editor assistance to the next level, with nuanced UI wizards that combine your existing document with desired style and creative goals. Rather than just generating “text”, you invoke wizards to help with specific parts of the creative process, like what would be in the pocket of a WWII soldier hiding in the woods, and how might that result in a plot twist?
  

• BedTimeStory.AI - UX Mechanism: End-to-end generation at micro scale.
  
  Book after book has been written about plot templates guaranteed to produce a cohere narrative. BedTimeStory.AI implements a few of these archetypes in five-paragraph form, using LLMs to fill in the colors and details. The resulting stories are of “bedtime for a five year old” quality — this is a compliment! They’ll only get better from here.
  

• Dramatron - UX Mechanism: End-to-end generation at large scale.
  
  Dramatron attempts BedTimeStory.AI’s “story template” model at a much larger scale: containing scene generation, character generation, and “beat sequences” that advance plot through tension buildup and resolution. This isn’t over-engineering; this is how Hollywood produces scripts like a factory. If I were Netflix, Amazon, or Hulu, I’d be salivating over this.
  

Have a request for a theme or tips on a great project to check out? Let me know!

Shipped with AI is brought to you by Steamship, a package manager for hosted AI apps.