Sudowrite – The AI Novel Writing Partner

On Wednesday, James Yu, sci-fi writer and founder of Sudowrite – a full-service long-form storytelling AI – took to Twitter to announce his program’s new story engine.  It promises to help authors streamline the entire writing process from concept to draft and beyond. It might be the most comprehensive AI tool allowing long-form storytelling.

In the fifteen-minute video, which has been seen over 800,000 times, James takes the viewer through the story of the program and an entire tour of Sudowrite’s operations from a user’s perspective. First, he discusses how the interface came to be. According to James, it was a collaborative effort between the Sudowrite team and hundreds of novelists.

But of course, the UI interface isn’t the story. What James claims is that writers, using the Sudowrite AI program, were able to draft entire novels in only a few days. For those who may not know, this is a fraction of the time it takes most writers to draft a novel.

Though this is nothing new in regards to using AI to help create novels, what makes Sudowrite stand out is how it generates the content with the writer. In the past, normally one would have to prepare ChatGPT like LLM with a series of prompts and carefully review the output.

The review part is still in place, Sudowrite cuts much of the prompt engineering out of the equation, and gives the user, or users, an easy-to-manage step-by-step input process to create a story. Sudowrite is interesting, but not surprising. As Goldman Sachs reported on earlier this year, hundreds of millions of jobs, from finance to the creative world, is expected to be impacted by generative AI.

Since AI has gone mainstream in mid-2022, the creative fields have been feeling the impact of the technology the most. This has been seen with AI-generated art, writing, and others. But what does this mean in the long term for writers in this case?

It will be difficult to tell for some time. Though writers helped James Yu to build out Sudowrite functions, the community seems to be apprehensive about AI entering, much like the art community. If you’re interested, you can watch the full fifteen-minute view below, and if you want to learn more about generative AI, then ODSC Europe should be on your radar. Whether in-person or virtually, you’ll be immersed in the latest in AI at ODSC Europe.

Today's a big day for Sudowrite. We're launching Story Engine, an AI tool for writing long-form stories.

Our awesome team worked with hundreds of novelists for months to build the ideal interface for writers and machines to collaborate on a narrative. pic.twitter.com/kccZfkpGth

— james yu (@jamesjyu) May 17, 2023