I'm Struggling to Get Any of My Stories Started

I will add one more tip: If you are well and truly stuck, get an actual notebook and a pen and write on paper first. Computers have way too many distractions that make it easy to click around and get nothing done. Rip it out afterwards if you're worried about people seeing it (or do like me and develop such shit handwriting that no one else can decipher it anyway), but just getting it onto paper helps start the process.

 

It's a black box.

edit: Why does it only show a video in my reply but not in Gambino's?

 

With the caveat that anything an AI generates is going to be the pantsiest pants that ever pantsed. It doesn't even know what sex or the real world is. It just knows that English sentences about sex usually have these words in them, and the words can be arranged in such-and-such order to be syntactically valid.

You won't get character arcs or a satisfying throughline without structure. You'll just get a list of a bunch of stuff that happened. All meat, no bones. Like some sort of narrative sausage. It can still be a useful tool, you just need to use it like the filler it is, and know how/when to massage the random output into something shaped like a story.

 

Haven't use AI for this, but it sounds potentially useful for generating descriptive sentences that don't sound repetitive, which is always a problem for me. Like an auto-thesaurus.

 

So, I tested out NovelAI. Calling it AI is a bit of a stretch, it's essentially a story-writing chat bot. You give it text, and it searches through a big database of other text, find some similar stuff, smushes it together, and spits back something it thinks sounds similar to what would come next based on its "learning." Most of the time the result does not actually fit with the story, and often is full of gibberish and/or contradictions. However, if you just keep hitting retry over and over again, eventually it will spit out a sentence or two and you'll be like...hey, that's pretty good. Then you delete half of what it wrote, add your own sentences before and after to connect it with your existing story, repeat a few times and before you know it, you've written a few pages.

Not bad, really.

And then your free trial runs out. *whistles*

 

Agreed. The AI's context (ie, the part of your story it uses to generates a response) is fairly small. It only builds on what you've produced during the last couple of pages. If something happened 5 pages ago, it won't remember it at all. As a result, it has no concept of long-term plot or structure, nor does it understand character arcs, or anything else that requires more than a chapter's worth of text.

That said, OP's problem wasn't "I've written several 50k word muddled quagmires but I have no idea how to structure them", for which AI support would be worse than useless. It was "I have a hard time to keep my story going beyond the introduction". For that particular problem, I think it's a great help to an instant feedback for every sentence you write, to build on and take inspiration from and sometimes be surprised by, even if the prose is far from Shakespeare, and the long-term structure non-existent. That's your job, the author's job, to shape the sentence-level, paragraph-level output into a proper story with a beginning, middle, and end... but that's exactly the fun part!

This is exactly my experience.

 

While I only minimally understand their token systems, they have options to force the AI to remember a certain amount of content, though they warn that, because the AI is stupid, sometimes it will over-emphasize that content.

There are also a ton of very technical settings that I have no idea what they do. Maybe they make it better. NovelAI could do with a much better system for explaining how things work (past the tutorial, which is pretty good...except that it uses up your free generations...kind of scammy)

 

Didn't someone write a Harry Potter story using this method?

Harry Potter and the Portrait of What Looked Like a Large Pile of Ash

 

Yeah. You can tweak the text that goes into it, but the overall limit on how much text the AI can use for its generation is still the same: some of the recent story text, some of your relevant lore, maybe a style note. All of that is still just flat text, though, and (if you'll excuse me speculating wildly for a moment) feeding it too much non-story text might actually make it worse? You don't want the AI to generate text that looks like a lore entry, after all.

Haha, agreed. I was pretty annoyed when I noticed that.

 

Lore entries are generated based on specific term hits that you set, so if I create an Aman character, and I tag that character Aman, Onfy, Mous, Author, Awesome Person, it will only reference that lore entry if it sees those words nearby. (99% sure this is how it works)

I believe the author note, however, is always referenced, so you'd have to be pretty careful with that.

 

Yeah, that is how it works. What I meant is that lore entries that are included this way are generally not formatted like story text. You want to include as much information in as few tokens as possible, so they tend to be phrased more like Wikipedia articles, or worse still, dry lists of properties. Or at least mine were.

 

Yes, I've ended up doing that also, due to the token limits. I DO wonder, however, if lack of structure harms the AI's writing, given the higher priority it gives these sections. Hopefully not.