New Era for Authors and Writers

News of the week

• Anthropic announces updates to their primary model Claude. Claude now has a 200,000 token context window which equals about 150,000 words.

• Inflection-2 has been released. The company, Inflection, has demonstrated that with a smaller context window, their chatbot can perform as well if not better than other major LLMs on the market today.

• Orca-2 has been released by Microsoft. What is unique about this AI model is that this LLM has been built to use a smaller number of tokens. I discussed Orca, the first version, in the Tiny Stories issue.

I was having a conversation last week with a friend who was writing a novel or novella for NANOWRIMO. Nanowrimo is the annual write-a-book-in-a-month sprint that happens every year. We ended up discussing AI tools for writing such as ChatGPT and other tools like Jasper.ai, Koala.ai, and Scalenut.ai. There are so many out there. Sudowrite is another tool that we discussed.

I pointed out that now could be a great time to become a writer, or it could be the worst time. I think this way because what I have found with AI writing tools is that these tools are helpful for unlocking creativity and for helping me to find ideas to write.

AI writing tools help with

• Brainstorming

• Thought experiments

• Making unlikely connections or thinking across domains

• Inspirational prompts

• and creating blog outlines or book outlines chapter by chapter

We could be entering a time of expanded creativity and creation for authors and writers of all types and skills. We saw a somewhat similar thing happen when music became more electronic. With AI tools it is possible for a writer to not get stuck with the blank page/screen forever. But by using a chatbot you can work your way through those roadblocks that have kept so many in the past from completing their novel or short story.

I no longer try using chatbots or paid AI tools like Koala by using just the one-click method. What I do is use these tools to create an outline first. Then I review the outline. Letting a tool like ChatGPT or Claude simply write an entire blog post without review or guidance beyond supplying a keyword will not get you the results you might hope to get from these tools.

At this point, we are still in the early stages of AI tools for writing, image creation, ideation, and whatever else. As things currently stand with chatbot tools they still need a lot of guidance and that takes skills and subject matter understanding to know when the tool is not outputting useful content. These tools are like junior copywriters, and being that they need a helping hand.

As I pointed out in my Tiny Stories issue these tools hoover up all the content they can. The makers of these LLMs do not have the subject matter expertise in every area to vet all data inputs for quality, so when using a chatbot the good writing and the bad writing are placed side-by-side without any differentiation. And that is why output straight from a chatbot is bland.

But if you made a chatbot with just Steven King, or Proust, or David Ogilvy then you’d really have an excellent chatbot.