"Tools" like this make me feel nothing but a profound sense of sadness and despair.
https://www.anthologialitt.com/post/the-god-thoth-and-the-in...
Every invention is a Faustian pact. It amplifies certain things and atrophies others.
Personally I think the approach I'll take with literature is the same as other things: I'll evaluate it in its merit and not try to guess on its origin. We're already awash in people accusing actual human writing of being "AI" while meanwhile AI writing slips under the radar. It's pointless. It is what it is when it arrives at my eyeballs.
If I wrote a book I would not use the AI to craft prose, not from AI-hate but because to me it kind of defeats the purpose. I would, however, use it as a first pass proofreader and editor, and maybe as a brainstorming "rubber duck that talks back." It's pretty good at those things.
-- From the link:
“This invention, O king,” said Theuth, “will make the Egyptians wiser and will improve their memories; for it is an elixir of memory and wisdom that I have discovered.”
But Thamus replied,
“Most ingenious Theuth, one man has the ability to beget arts, but the ability to judge of their usefulness or harmfulness to their users belongs to another; and now you, who are the father of letters, have been led by your affection to ascribe to them a power the opposite of that which they really possess.
For this invention will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their memory. Their trust in writing, produced by external characters which are no part of themselves, will discourage the use of their own memory within them.
You have invented an elixir not of memory, but of reminding; and you offer your pupils the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom, for they will read many things without instruction and will therefore seem to know many things, when they are for the most part ignorant and hard to get along with, since they are not wise, but only appear wise."
I think if someone wanted to produce a slop book for amazon with 1667 there are easier tools for that.
If you had a kid, let's say 6 years old, and they had a "super hero" they wrote stories about.
What would it mean, if you took away their creative process and replaced it with this.
Does that child have a lesser "life-experience?" Or not?
What about you?
What it really is is a kind of choose your own adventure. You can be 6 years old and write stories and then an hour later play a choose-your-own-adventure game and no one would find that weird
We are going to have kids who, instead of imagining their own fantasy lands, are given them by AI. Of course the AI will be far superior to a 6 year old- how will they be able to resist the AI drip, when even adults can't.
A generation growing up without imagining. So depressing.
I guess we have a few years before it starts. Or maybe it already has.
Wow.
I hope this doesn't happen. I hope the kids are smarter than us.
Creative people love to play with new tools. Photography was supposed to destroy all art, but it became its own art form. Did synthesizers destroy music? Musicians even figured out how to turn a record player, a device made for nothing but replaying existing music, into a musical instrument. Look up "turntablism." Give an artist anything and they'll start fiddling with it and seeing what it can do, and they'll do that with AI just like they did with electronics and record players and anything else.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ekgpZag6xyQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NnRVmiqm84k
The people flooding e-book markets with slop are doing a new variation on the dropship get rich quick scheme, not trying to create books. They don't care what's in there, just that they can game reviews.
I expect artists playing with AI to get into hacking models and model runtimes themselves. It's one reason I think open weight models are so important. They're hackable, remixable, re-trainable.
What you would become, in effect, is the fictional Soviet 'writer' from Sam Kriss' 2011 short story 'The Machine'.
https://samkriss.com/2011/10/01/the-machine/
I do not think there is anything to aspire to in that.
This caters to a different lets say need.
Like I said in another post it's more like low tech holodeck or maybe create your own adventure. Where the story evolves based on simple directives
As someone once said, "Fail again. Fail better."
And, anyway, so what if they are bad? They are authentically the product of a single human soul rather than some grey-gruel average of millions. There is an awful lot of value in that.
Maybe the tree system and branch switching would still work without attaching it to an LLM backend.
But the editor would have to be more advanced I think.
Would be cool to try and build something like that.
More broadly, you might be interested in language models because they are new, and you don't want to discount the value of new, constantly-evolving tools for your art form until you have explored them and understood their strengths and limitations.
I personally have not found language models very useful at all for serious work thus far. I am curious, though, about why many people are openly dismissive of the potential artistic value of what is an extremely new tool, and - maybe more importantly - those who choose to use it.
How other writers write doesn't strike me as any of my business, beyond what I can learn from their methods.
it can be addictive to tell stories with friends or world-build, so why not a 'friend'?
Maybe add in some different "AI reviewer" type things, one to read broadly for enjoyment and give feedback, another as an editor to fine-tune particular sections. Even with these it should provide feedback, not re-written sections.
But I love the TUI approach and keeping things simple and organized for you, so you don't have to bother with all that. Bonus if it had some nice LaTeX / epub / PDF / html reader output.
Would be interesting to split this out into a separate app that only does this
For 'context priming' I'd like to see an interface that supports this. Not just alts and variations, but an assistant or companion that challenges what's already on the page, and sometimes doesn't even look back at what's been thrown out.
Forgetting can be just as effective as capturing.
Will be interesting to see where you take this. I'd love to see more experimentation around AI tooling and UX to support creativity.
The only thing I would avoid is calling it an AI writing tool haha. I didn't realize this was such a sore topic. Probably naive of me
This is spectacularly wrong headed. If you want a book with your name on it for adulation or career reasons, but lack the interest, time or talent to produce one - hire a ghost writer. Writers are affordable and plentiful.
Similarly if you have a hyperspecific interest, kink or genre preference - use your position as a presumably well remunerated tech person to hire a writer to cater to it. Trust me, we need the patronage.
If you're looking for the pleasure of writing, you will unfortunately have to undergo, as all writers have through history, the process of suffering and discovery that we call writing.
You're not a musician if you hop onto Suno and generate a song. You're not a filmmaker if you open Gemini Omni and prompt some video. And you're not a bloody writer if you have an LLM do it for you. Talk about wheelchairs for the mind...
I had it working and then realized that no matter how hard I put walls up between my artistic abilities and the llm was impossible.
The llm’s interference would eventually corrupt my own thinking process.
I tossed it and know anything I write will stand apart from GenAI.
I like to be strategic summarize the correct places when the context gets full.
There is a request inspector that shows everything that is sent.
I'm experimenting with prompt ordering strategies as well. this is surprisingly complext when you take into account the different model providers.
For example local models usually do a different form of prompt caching than for example openai and anthropic
Seems a bit low to me. Yeah, I know that's way bigger than a book, but surely there is conversation, iteration history, etc
The strength of feeling in those comments - such as this one - is really interesting:
>"you've missing [sic] the entire point of writing fiction."
Some would argue that if art makes you feel anything this strongly, it's 100% doing its job. Maybe you're not missing the point at all!
I'm interested to try it out, and perhaps build some features on top of what it's doing already. I've been using trees a lot for the novel I've been working on for the last couple of years, but haven't managed to find the best way to visualise them in a UI, so I'm excited to see what you settled on. Trees can get really unwieldy really fast, with basically infinite combinations - especially if you're working at a very granular level.
I'm curious about anyone else here who has run into the same or a similar problem, and how they approached it. There are more plausible paths through this manuscript than I can personally hold in my head, which is quite different from approaches I've used in the past, where structures have been more formalised and deviation from them was thus quite limited.
Thanks for sharing this!
yes exactly. My main motivation for writing this was to try my hand at it. I'm not happy yet. First started looking at loom interfaces but all have the same problem of how you visualize it.
My try is a in the map (m) if you want to check it out. I feel like the path view works reasonably well but tree and mass not so much.
This is really difficult to solve.
Happy to hear your ideas or see your solutions
My current hunch is that it requires a Z axis. Google Earth, for example, manages to convey quite a lot of interesting variables simply (and has maybe been underutilised as a type of UI):
- Longitude
- Latitude
- Granularity / altitude ("the same, but different")
- Paths between destinations
- On Msoft Flight Sim, a slider can amend the time (to change weather, the sun, etc). This gives you another variable to work with.
I haven't tested implementing UIs from this hunch yet, but that's where I'm at currently. It feels like there's a lot of useful parallels.
Even if I won't use it since I dislike using the terminal, I still think its very creative tool for writing.
Strangely I can also understand all the hate but what are you going do? For all those that hate, don't shoot the messenger - the author of the tool is only using those tools that everyone else is also using.
We are collectively going down a very sloppery (pun intended) slope and the author of the tool is just being creativity for their own purposes. Hate the companies pushing this slop down our throats, not those that make use of the existing tools and pushing them to new uses - that's called learning.
After all this hate I'm thinking about stripping out the ai parts of the webui and making it a manual writing tool maybe. Keep the branching and tree visualizations
It's pretty easy to invoke disgust and pain. That doesn't make public toilets and getting shot pieces of art 100% doing their job.
i also made an app for my writing process and quickly realized it was a distraction from the actual work of writing
I wanted to have a simple way to navigate my story in a tree form but cli is really not great in displaying those. Lazygit is the best imo but still not great. WebUIs are not really better
Looms seem to work a bit better, which is also what 1667 is based on. But still I don't know needs work
I like your tool by the way, I don't understand what sort of person would have such visceral hate towards someone's creation.
They don't have to use it but it is nice for you to share your creation.
Don't be put off by them, they actually secretly use LLMs for their own work and they are embarrassed of putting it out there to protect their own 'programmer' ego.
Keep going!
Removed the email address from the homepage just in case.
Appreciate your reply thank you.
That being said, I wouldn’t have published something like this because I do assume the worse.
But it’s morally wrong to assume every one lacks honesty…
Tough one
Less colloquially, is "spiritual deadening" something we should/can force people away from?
Not sure why you're getting so much hate. Internet is already chock-full of slop, a new TUI-based tool is not going to make it measurably worse.
I didn't like the character focused chat interaction. You can configure it for novel writing.
The way it treats alternate takes feels wrong to me. It's not branching off of alternates if you know what I mean.
Ignore the haters, they're a HN rite of passage. Good luck with your writing!
Yeah I spent a lot of time thinking about this problem. Wanted to make it easy to navigate multiple takes and multiple branches.
It's a difficult UX problem. I feel like the path view of the map works reasonably well but tree/mass not so much. Needs more thinking
Someone said "a generation growing up without imagining. So depressing." This reads like old man yells to clouds. Through history you can find these comments about upcoming generations all over the place... We can make the same arguments in the past "oh you spend so much time reading others stories instead of writing your own? Yeah, you lack imagination kid, you're in big trouble."
To have nuance and avoid over-generalizing is a good exercise in today's society I guess.
Anyway I have children myself. They play, they write, they draw. And occasionally we do tech stuff like this. I use it as a choose-your-own-adventure with them. We also make up our own stories for bedtime. I don't see these things as exclusive
Don't forget Hacker News is known for amazing commentary like this https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224
There isn't even any tracking or account setup with the OP's software?
I'm curious if you have your own creation that doesn't use LLMs at all that you think everyone can benefit from?
We should encourage people to create software even if they use AI to help them.
Calling something 'slop' without any further arguments or constructive criticism for the OP isn't in the spirit of HN.
The reaction is because OP's software facilitates the outsourcing of creative writing to a agentic content mill, and many HN users take issue with that.
It seems that the only people who are hating on this aren't even writers themselves.
But very grumpy programmers on HN who probably don't write (except probably documentation) and probably AI anyway in their READMEs and even their docs.
I think that many who are angry on here are angry on behalf of writers, I've seen a writer who is actually interested in this tool, myself included.
I will gladly be the counter-example, then. I program. I'm grumpy. I also, however, write fiction - and have for well over twenty years now.
Writing is a skill I acquired and honed through hard work, diligence, and practice. I would no more cede "creative" control of my stories to a LLM than I would load a MIDI track onto my piano and claim the piano's perfect rendition as my own.
But feel free to characterise I - and others - as "grumpy coders who probably don't write".
I have better use of my time having writer's block, translating in many different languages and all the boring stuff that slows me down from telling great stories in my writing.
As long as there is a human behind it who is more creative, I think LLMs should be more celebrated when used properly.
The obvious slop is from those who don't put in any of the work and that is the problem.