I've always wanted to write an epic fantasy novel. I've half-way seriously written down the plot, some characters, some scenes, the ending etc. Actually, did some writing ...

But what stopped me is I realized that side of the brain was messed up. After decades of technical writing, proposals, business emails etc. I just wasn't a "creative writing" person, I think my plot was great but my prose really, really sucked ... much more the "tell, not show".

Now, there is a new paradigm ...

For the past couple weeks, I've been watching a bunch of YT and trying out several pieces of software with AI assisted writing. There's a lot of variety out there and there's a lot of different AI engines, some much better than others. It's very evident that we are at the early stages of AI assisted writing (and bugginess), but it's only going to get better.

So, if anyone dreams of writing a fiction novel, I'd say brush off that dust and start checking out the software available.

I have had a coming of age story set in a zombie apocalypse kicking around in my mind for a long time.

Nice.

May I suggest either Sudowriter and NovelCrafter for "fiction writing".

Sudowriter is more mature and costs more. NovelCrafter is more buggy but is more my "workflow" ... and significantly cheaper as I'm exploring stuff.

I'm thinking I'm going to write with NovelCrafter as first draft and then use Sudowriter to clean it up. I've subscribed to both just to play around and better understand how things work.

Just a note. Zombies imply violence. ChatGPT and some other AIs will admonish you for trying to use them. Sudowriter and NovelCrafter lets you plug into other AIs but their "prose" is not near as good as ChatGPT.

FWIW I'm also looking into AI generated art. Write a book for Kindle self publishing, you need at a minimum a book cover.

Been checking out Dall-e, Midjourney and Stable Diffusion. Haven't gotten as far yet in my research but those are the 3 coming up. Anyone have any insights, let me know.

From what I've read, either pay $ for someone to create the cover, or use an AI generator and some photoshop to add the title, author's name etc. I'm thinking the latter for my first attempt ...

In addition to providing structure and helping you with the writing, the AI can also be very helpful with brainstorming your idea.

In GPT-4 Turbo, I prompted below. It came up with some pretty good stuff.

That's pretty good. It's amazing the stuff it comes up with. I particularly enjoy adding Don Knotts to any novel of screenplay idea I feed into it. I'm not sure we need writers anymore.

On another note, a former CEO of a very large Idaho corporation has come to work for our office and did a little speech for everyone a while back. The one thing I remember was him talking about how he was trying to get companies to understand and embrace the internet in the 90's but nobody could understand what it would be and why it was relevant to them. There were fortunes won and lost, careers that rose and fell, and it was all based on that ability to grasp what the internet could be. He said we are exactly in that same time period right now with respect to AI.

I had a post outlining the broad plot of my book, but decided I don't actually want to share that. :p

On a very high level, the protagonist is separated from his longtime crush and must make his way to her. As he journeys toward her at great peril to himself, we get flashbacks showing how he fell for her. It's set in the 80s/90s.

You may be too late.

See Netflix “Love and Monsters”

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=-19tBHrZwOM

Throw in Don Knotts and it's a whole new thing.

I plugged him into Edward64's ChatGPT question and he played a eccentric survivalist from the edge of town who is revealed to have developed a wide variety of useful gadgets to help out the protagonists through dangerous situations.

I recognized that Don Knotts has passed on, but, I think AI can solve that issue also.

I think this is cool and I like the goal.

But no, don't think I'd volunteer to be Beta or v1.

Dude can't make cars that don't blow up. No way I want him putting a chip in my brain.

I've seen how this turns out...

In case you guys missed it, Sora is going to be revolutionary. We're only in the beginning stages ...

Sora


Checkout the YT video below. The author also shares the prompts to generate the video.

Nice. I have not been here for a while, but have been toying with AI stuff for quite a while now. On Facebook, I am doing what I used to do here and create fake movie stills using AI with Facebook friends that allow me to use their face and create an entire story, poster, and roughly 30 to 50 images per movie.

I have been doing this every week just to stay on top of all the tools and try to use them creatively to see what type of workflows I can create.

Every 3 weeks, on Facebook, we go through a process of selecting a genre , subgenre, and also have a casting call. By then end of the week, the selected genre and subgenre are used to create 2 movies for the next 2 weeks



So far here is my weekly process:
1. Create Title for Movie
2. Create Synposis for Movie
3. Select Cast Members
4. Create roles and descriptions for each character.
5. Create a story through Midjourney prompts based on my synopsis.
6. Create images based on the role and descriptions.
7. Use the images created for those characters as a reference for my later Midjourney prompts I set up above.
8. Faceswap the images and fix them up.

Here are some examples images from the workflow and final movie.

I have learned a lot about various local and online AI tools. Anything from Midjourney, ChatGPT, Claude, Leonardo AI to Fooocus, LM Studio and even Topaz AI plugins. And the video and audio realms are freaking wild right now.

I have been having way too much fun with suno for the last week or so, and yeah it is impressive and terrifying what they can do already. I wasn't too impressed by the image or chat stuff in the relatively early days, whereas some of the current stuff has blown my mind. I used it to make a song about my cats:

one day in our lord's heaven | Suno

Oh man....that is pretty good. You should check out the new audio tool (only out in the last couple of day) called Udio (udio.com). The quality of this is freaking bonkers and it is crazy how far both this and standard audio AI tools are rapidly advancing.

Example of one I created for my fake film: https://on.soundcloud.com/Z2pHAXrs2okzndSq6

Love it! I tried to sign up to check out udio, but got waitlisted.

Overall, It's a powerful tool for brainstorming ideas and getting creative inspiration. However, when it comes to writing unique and polished texts, nothing beats the expertise and human touch provided by professional writing services like mysupergeek. They can help elevate your content to the next level and ensure that it stands out from the crowd.

Glad to see more smart glasses coming out.

The functionality highlighted below seems pretty limited but have to start somewhere. I can see going backpacking, seeing a mushroom and asking ChatGPT to tell me what type it was and if it was safe to eat.

I think I like the recording functionality but only if I was doing it. How would I feel if I was sitting across from someone at a gate who was possibly recording me (without my permission). That's arguably okay but what if I saw someone staring at my daughter with these glasses on?

Here comes a Meta Ray-Bans challenger with ChatGPT-4o and a camera - The Verge

I guess this was inevitable. I am curious how well it really does in the back-and-forth conversations. Guys escape reality by computer gaming, this is the female version?

I have smart glasses, but not the "AI" or "weirdo video" kind. I have Echo Frames by Amazon. I mainly got them so that I can listen to music or make phone calls without having to find my earbuds, so it's sort of an "ultimate laziness" thing. They do have Alexa on them, which IMO is so much more useful than having ChatGPT would be. I like having them, but I do have complaints about how often they work, and how comfortable they are, so I'm hoping they will make more at this level.

Since we’re on this topic I wanted to share my opinions on this.

I’m a proponent and am concerned about GPT’s.

The speed of delivery these tools provide is mind blowing. The ability to do work for us is both convenient but also concerning. We’ve all kicked these pros and cons around quite a bit, but this is how I’ve decided it’s best to be used in the current environment.

I am a firm believer that the words on a page or the art on a book cover belong solely to the human mind. Personally, I crave the thoughts of others but not the collective. I want something that is unique. A computer model that relies on previous sources can certainly create uniqueness but ultimately it’s a mix of others work 100%. Sure, nothing can be generated without the influence of others, but the mind is still a vastly uncapped space that can find new material that current GPT models cannot overcome (sentience?)

Having said that, I have been writing a series of historical novels for quite a few years now. The mere decision to start, followed by the enormous level of effort this task entailed, was beyond my comprehension at the start. I work for a living so this has all been done on the side, during lunch hours, late and night and now that over 50, a lot of it has been moved to the early morning. Hundreds if not thousands of hours. GPT could have done it in a few days of tweaking prompts, I suppose, but it would not be me writing it, in fact, I wouldn’t be sure who was writing it at all, but I know for sure I would t read it.

Why wouldn’t I read it? It’s just words on a page, right? Well, when I know something is written by AI, my level of excitement in reading it diminishes quickly after the initial ‘wow’ factor that GPT can do that (or if it’s a synopsis of a meeting I didn’t attend which is a really great use of AI). For fiction reading, it quickly becomes sterile, perhaps even predictable, but when you pick up a novel by, let’s say, Stephen King, you get a lot more than the words on the page. You get to see how King’s mind ticks. A much more immersive experience, if you ask me.

But does that mean GPT’s are of no value in the artist’s development or desire to become a professional? Not at all. I have used GPT’s for a number of things related to this project. I used it to act as a developmental editor, a line editor, beta readers of passages and even whole chapters. Is the feedback helpful? Yes and no, but what is helpful and what is not comes back to me as the writer. The individual. It’s made me think of a lot of new ideas and concepts.

Does that mean I shouldn’t be hiring a professional editor? No! You need a professional at some point if it’s a serious project, but for people just starting off (or struggling) why not get some help to tighten your manuscripts up before leaping off the deep end in? You can save some money but it’s a blend. You are really using GPT to strengthen your skills.

Also, one day I’ll need cover art. As proficient as I am with Photoshop, I’m not an artist. I’ve used Dall-E and its provoked some great ideas and thoughts for cover art, but ultimately, it feels sterile, predictable. But as a non-artist, I see the value of getting an idea or a theme from these tools to allow me to articulate what I would like from a professional artist. To influence the artist to some degree so I don’t waste his/her time.

These are the things that help the struggling writer or the struggling graphic artist. I refuse to see it as a replacement for human ingenuity, but it can certainly be very helpful.

I’ve toyed with writing using ChatGPT and like. Fantastic for ideas but prose is still severely lacking … unless you are writing porn.

Any legit tips are welcome.

BTW you aren’t Bernard Cornwell are you?

Haha, oh yeah, I’ve baked Cornwell into many prompts when asking for feedback. There is a Creative Writing Plug-in that I use, but I honestly don’t know what’s different about it compared to the vanilla. When I ask for feedback on pacing, passive voice, dialogue, anachronisms… I will ask at the prompt for the GPT to basically role play as a beta reader or one type of editor or another. So I’ll ask it to be well versed with the writing style of Cornwell or Follett among others and see if I get different responses. I think over time it will conflate the authors and it becomes a jumble of responses so it’s not super helpful in that regard, but still somewhat helpful.

One way that I find is very helpful is to put in a couple of sentences or a paragraph and ask it to expand upon it, for instance, I am very loaded with visual descriptions… it may tell me to tone it down to help with pacing or ask me to instead add more touch and smell senses to bring the environment to life. A lot of times it gives me a revision that I can mull over and if I like the flow I can build my world around the concept it’s trying to ask me to achieve.

Another way that is super helpful is finding words and slang that was popular in that time period (especially when using foreign languages to help identify the character at times). I can describe my character and ask if it would be appropriate for that character and it will give me feedback on if it fits the type of person to use that language. Super helpful.

Now a lot of that must be double checked and that’s where the lost hours in research and reading come into play. Hopefully the key word there is “lost” because time will slip by quickly while I try desperately to nail down the nuance of a time I never lived in but know many readers will crush the writing if it’s done poorly or lazily.

It really has been just one big experiment, but it’s been useful.

Thanks, all good tips.

I know there are a bunch of AI models, some better for fiction writing than others. Have you done comparisons and is ChatGPT 4.0 the best one for you?

Also, using any special software (like novelceafter) that is geared to using AI?

And because you’re doing what I’d like to do (but for Fantasy), making ‘decent’ money?

I’ve tried a few different apps and all of the are good for whatever their intended purposes are. But I’d say that 95% of my time is spent in…

Microsoft Word : Draft writing. It’s like what Dominos Pizza is to Pizza, which is my childhood comfort food. I feel right at home when I open up Word and can start banging out drafts without missing a beat.

Scrivener : I love scrivener for the ability to keep notes and break my work into chapters and then scenes and move them around. All scenes are POV and timeline accurate and that allows me to add in new scene layers easily without feeling like I’m putting things out of place.

ProWritingAid : This has been my go-to self-editor helper.

I don’t know about novel crafter, I’m guessing it’s similar to Scrivener though or Plottr (which is good for helping with timelines and character placement but I haven’t found much other usefulness from it).

What’s his name… Brandon Sanderson? He has classes he once taught at a university posted on YouTube. Very easy going, relatable and touches on the core concepts of writing a novel that is easy to digest (bit of course, hard to master). I’d suggest giving him a listen, especially since you will be writing in a similar genre.

I have gone through a few full edits of my first novel, I’ve been to local writing workshops, met with literary agents and professional editors. I’ve still got a ways to go since this is just a hobby for me but I’ve learned a lot. If you ever want to talk about any of it, I’d be happy to help if I can.

I'm still ignoring this technology, but I did come across this yesterday and it's hilarious. Good on Tsitsipas for posting this and laughing at it, although it is painfully on point.

Asking ChatGPT to roast me:

"Stefanos Tsitsipas: the guy who spends more time philosophizing on Twitter than actually serving up a solid second serve. He’s the only player who can turn a simple changeover into a TED Talk on Greek mythology and still come back to the court with…

— Stefanos Tsitsipas (@steftsitsipas) August 19, 2024

DuckDuckGo has made chatbots available without tracking or any of that crap.

https://duck.ai

I asked it for a million dollar idea:

Here’s a million-dollar idea that combines technology and sustainability:

**Smart Home Energy Management System**

**Concept**: Develop a smart home energy management system that uses AI and machine learning to optimize energy consumption in residential homes. The system would analyze energy usage patterns, weather forecasts, and real-time energy prices to provide homeowners with actionable insights and recommendations for reducing energy costs and carbon footprints.

**Features**:
1. **Real-Time Monitoring**: Track energy usage of appliances and systems in real-time, providing users with detailed insights into their consumption patterns.
2. **Automated Controls**: Integrate with smart home devices (thermostats, lights, appliances) to automatically adjust settings for optimal energy efficiency based on user preferences and external factors.
3. **Dynamic Pricing Alerts**: Notify users of peak and off-peak energy pricing, allowing them to shift usage to save money.
4. **Sustainability Reports**: Generate monthly reports showing energy savings, carbon footprint reduction, and tips for further improvements.
5. **Incentive Programs**: Partner with utility companies to offer incentives for users who reduce their energy consumption, creating a win-win situation.

**Market Potential**: With the growing emphasis on sustainability and energy efficiency, this system could appeal to environmentally conscious consumers and homeowners looking to reduce their energy bills. Additionally, as smart home technology continues to grow, integrating energy management into existing smart home ecosystems could capture a significant market share.

**Revenue Model**: The business could generate revenue through subscription services, partnerships with utility companies, and selling hardware (if applicable).

This idea leverages current trends in technology and sustainability, making it relevant and potentially lucrative.

Love this. I've always wanted to create/direct a movie. Sound pretty simplistic right now but can see competition expanding its functionality (creating a movie from a screenplay).

Check out the sample prompts & videos in the article.

Meta's Movie Gen AI Video Generator Is Capable of Making Actual Movies, Music Included

New term going viral soon (generative AI --> AGI or artificial general intelligence)

I do not believe current stuff is AI (e.g. I want to see some 'reasoning' ability). But am very interested in seeing what AGI can do.

Sam Altman says “we are now confident we know how to build AGI� - Ars Technica

Meh, Excel materially changes the output of companies. All AI does is replace a human interpretive layer (partially) with a machine one.

AI still doesn't have even rudimentary reasoning ability. It's why it still fails both AP English exams. It can't develop a line of reasoning.

We don't treat other CEOs the way we treat AI CEOs.

If the CEO of McDonalds were to come out and just declare that within two years they'd have a hamburger that tasted twice as good and cost half as much and didn't cause heart disease, there would be some pushback.

But Altman and Musk can just get out there and "predict" anything, and it is reported as news.

American TechBros: AI requires trillions of dollars of venture capital and server farms the size of Portugal. And we can't share our code with you because it is so very special. And we are so very special because we control this vast unimaginable power.

Deepseek: Hey, we got this thing to run on open source code on a couple of used Pentium 5s. Fun.

The man behind the curtain moment is pretty funny.

My portfolio would disagree....

FWIW there was acknowledgment & excitement about DeepSeek a month ago (vs just past 5 days).

Have to monitor r/LocalLLaMA more closely.

I don't get people calling this a "Sputnik" moment.

This isn't China surpassing us.

This is a Chinese company showing us that the techbros asking for literally trillions of dollars in investment are hucksters and snake oil salesmen.

Thank god trump just promised half a trillion dollars for AI investment for all those tech bros.

Bloomberg article is paywalled, so pasted from reddit

Blocked

It could be sour grapes but my guess is there was some IP theft (China's SOP). But we know that some/much of the OpenAI training was done with digital assets that their authors did NOT okay either.

So if true, frak 'em both. But if DeepSeek did cheat, I look forward to Nvidia regaining her #1 spot of $4T+ or so.

If the theft accusation is true, then yeah, not a Sputnik moment.


Pretty sure Trump did not promise the 3 companies $500B. It was the other way around. The 3 companies promised $500B into their AI efforts to be on the stage with Trump. However, my guess is fair odds the entire $500B won't come to fruition unless the stars align for the 3 companies.

Taking data in an "unauthorized manner" is the business model of AI.

"Your plagiarism machine plagiarized our plagiarism machine!"

A house of cards on top of a house of cards.

Wake me up when it's something more than a next-gen search engine with a word jumbler on top.

There it is.

Okay, crisis averted. Take if FWIW

Still impressive but not as impressive as initially thought.

DeepSeek might not be as disruptive as claimed, firm reportedly has 50,000 Nvidia GPUs and spent $1.6 billion on buildouts | Tom's Hardware

Why is this crisis averted?

If it was true that humanity could have AI for trillions less in investment than we thought, that would be a great thing, right?

Sorry, I meant crisis averted for those “AI stocks that took a big hit last week because DeepSeek was done much cheaper than how they did it”.

This includes NVidia who is now, arguably, more of an important bellweather stock than Apple.

Sounds like they caught Meta red handed, the emails in the article are pretty damning. Assuming there is a big fine, how in the world will they figure out how much to pay to whom?

Court documents show not only did Meta torrent terabytes of pirated books to train AI models, employees wouldn't stop emailing each other about it: 'Torrenting from a corporate laptop doesn't feel right' | PC Gamer