Sudowrite: The Rise of AI Tools in

FEATURE

Sudowrite: The Rise of AI Tools in Publishing.

BY WYATT BANDT

“If Scrooge had been a man of a weak and timorous nature, he might have been at once scared to death by the apparition of his own face, looking out of a window at him with an indescribable menace. But Scrooge was not frightened easily. No, he was a man of a sturdy countenance.”

If I told you that this was an excerpt from A Christmas Carol, you’d likely believe me. It’s about Scrooge, captures his sour and haughty attitude, and most importantly, feels like Dickens. The narrator’s speaking style feels the same, and the vocabulary is archaic by modern standards.

But it’s not Dickens. It’s a reflection of him created by the AI program Sudowrite, something that started as a passion project because Amit Gupta and James Yu wanted to see what was possible for writers who used AI.

Amit Gupta left his previous career in 2014 to begin writing sci-fi, joining a writer’s group where he met James Yu. Several years later, they began working together on what eventually became Sudowrite.

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“We didn’t intend to build a writing company,” Amit said. “It was originally supposed to be just for us.”

Now, Sudowrite has over 500 users.

HOW SUDOWRITE WORKS WITH YOU

Sudowrite leverages several AI models, mainly GPT-3, that use deep-learning to generate believable text that looks like it was written by a human. By scouring the internet for text and open-source books, it can emulate famous writers like Dickens, Kafka, and Woolf.

It can even imitate your own style, so long as it has content to base its generation off of. It will carry recent plot elements forward and even recognizes character’s individual speaking styles. I plugged in the beginning of one of my own pieces, just to see how it treated me. The results surprised me.

The “Wormhole” feature, the button where the magic in Sudowrite happens, is aptly name because it was like peering into alternate realities of what my story could have been. While the writing wasn’t how I personally would have done it, and sometimes a little strange, it caught the heart of my writing, developing story beats, characters, and most notably, continuing the introspective and melancholic tone of that particular piece. It felt unfair, putting Sudowrite to the test against a fully realized story, but it made me realize how helpful the tool can be, especially in the early stages of drafting.

A college writing instructor of mine told us to “chase the heat” when drafting, meaning “when you write, keep writing about the thing that’s exciting you in that moment.” That’s exactly what Sudowrite does. It takes hints from your writing and says “What if?” by giving you a spark that you can quickly cultivate into a fire. Sure, you might not use its suggestion of your character walking into the field with a shotgun, but that same suggestion may mention the character’s troubled relationship with their father, and that may be a story beat you’re interested in exploring.

Using Sudowrite reminded me of how my friends and I often riff on a hypothetical until it spontaneously develops into a standalone sit-com episode, with characters, plot, and recurring jokes. Much like a writer’s room, Sudowrite takes some of the creative burden from you by throwing informed

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spaghetti at the wall, hoping to inspire you so you can keep writing.

REMOVING THE ‘DRUDGERY’ FROM WRITING

Most anyone who is a writer will agree that it’s a challenging job or hobby. The times when I meet another writer in the wild, it’s almost inevitable that we’ll talk about how we love to write, but we’re taking a break or we’re frustrated with what were working on. It’s a common problem of the trade, and it’s only exacerbated by silly mistakes like realizing a character works better in your head as a girl instead of a boy.

This is where Sudowrite can help. Amit said that one best things about Sudowrite is that it removes a lot of the “drudgery” from the writing process by getting rid of a “surprising number of non-creative tasks.” It softens writers block, removes mental strain from always needing to generate ideas from scratch, and it can make terribly mundane tasks like changing a character’s gender a breeze. It frees you up to focus on the things you want to focus on.

Amit also debunked, quite eloquently, how using AI to help you write doesn’t make you any less of a writer. He made an example of graphic designers and photographers. In the past, so much time needed to be spent in a darkroom; now, images can be rendered and edited nearly instantly. It doesn’t make those professionals any less creative. It makes the job easier and leaves them room to work on the parts they love and innovate in new ways.

In a sense, using AI or any program for that matter is no different that getting help from friends to do a quick peer-review. “Some writers do it all on their own, some use professionals,” Amit said. “It’s just a spectrum of the type of help that you get from your community. Even an editor is help, but it doesn’t stop you from being a writer.”

WHAT’S NEXT FOR SUDOWRITE?

Like all AI, Sudowrite won’t stop here. It will continue to grow and iterate as AI improves and the creators add and improve on the program. When I spoke to Amit, he said that they are always working to make Sudowrite better, namely by listening to feedback from their community.

One area they’re actively working on is

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expanding Sudowrite’s context window so it can look at a larger portion of your work when generating text instead of only the tail end. They’re also working on implementing an outlining system—like the Save the Cat or the Hero’s Journey templates—to help users who are writing screenplays or novels. They’re also working on improving the Wormhole feature. Currently, Wormhole gives four to five writing suggestions based off of what was previously written, but the hope is that the author will be able to give more guidance to the program so they can more easily find the beats that ‘fit’ into their vision for their story.

Amit and James are also working on incorporating Conjure, a digital art app, into Sudowrite. Conjure uses AI to generate images from text, and authors can create images of landscapes, characters, or even dragons based off their own text. While the images can be more surreal, sometimes capturing the essence of the text instead of a vivid image, the AI will only improve, and it doesn’t make it any less fun to use. Eventually, authors may be able to illustrate their own books solely by plugging their text into an AI. CAPTION: To give an example of what AI images look like, this image was made by WOMBO’s ‘Dream’ program from the text “White sheep grazing in a meadow at sunset.”

A LONG OVERDUE TOOL

Other fields have already benefitted greatly from technological advancements, and Sudowrite gives writers a much overdue tool to help them chase the fun in writing. Sudowrite gives writers a much overdue tool to help them. I can’t looking forward to seeing how AI and Sudowrite continue to evolve and help writers.

I’ll leave you with one last quote from Amit: “We don’t see Sudowrite as a replacement for writers; we see it as a creative augmentation tool that can help writers with the creative process.”

And, in the time I spent playing with it, I can assure you that’s exactly what it does.