Im not really after creating a fully automated system anyway, so everything is just adding to the writer’s toolkit.
From that point of view its all useful.
Currently looking at ways to develop characters, themes, subpots and story plans and use them to get from a premis to a scene or chapter list
That sounds highly doable. Have you had success? Care to share some insights?
Warning - long post… here are my ideas right now. working with the playground:
Ok, I’ve been working on prompts that will create more detailed premises with more emotional depth, and with complete story arcs.
I’ve been working on prompts which begin with characters who have depth and detail. Here’s an initial one that works (feel free to adapt and adopt). Of course, changing the words “quirky” and “literary” for other forms will change the style - i.e. “hardboiled” and “detective” could also be used, or “alien” and “sci-fi” :
Brainstorm a quirky or unusual character who could be the basis of a literary novel.
imagine:
Character:
1.
Once we’ve got the character, we can do another prompt to create a story around them (again, switch up the adjectives for other genres):
brainstorm a detailed synopsis for a literary novel, :including final climax of the story and all spoilers. Use the above character as the main protagonist. Use 500 words, about 6 paragraphs:
From here, let’s develop a supporting cast:
Other characters:
Imagine the other characters in the story, their names, descriptions of their looks, personalities and desires. Identify the lead antagonist, love interest, mentor, comic relief, and supporting characters Use 100 words for each character.
antagonist:
Now, consolidating the prompt to include all the above, let’s give it some subplots:
Imagine the subplots that this story might have aside from the main plot:
Now we’ve got some detailed story ideas, it’s time to hammer them into a format… I’ve suggested three ways to do that below. They may need refining. Pick the one you like.
brainstorm a “hero’s journey” breakdown for the above story:
Once you’ve got the breakdown, it’s time to get detailed:
Break this novel down into 20 chapters. Brainstorm chapter synopses for each chapter:
Chapter 1:
Next, we can use the “insert” tool to break each chapter down into scenes:
brainstorm the scenes in chapter 2. There are 3 scenes, each with a beginning, a middle and an end:
Scene 1:
beginning:[insert]
Next we have to break the scenes down into chunks - as seen in your video.
To do this, we’ll need to:
1shorten the prompt - it’s getting out of control
2 increase the level of detail and colour. Chunks often have little to do with the main thrust of the story and concern themselves with granular details. I.e. it’s fine to spend a chunk talking about the barista in a coffee shop the protagonist visits simply because that character illustrates the way the protagonist is feeling at that particular moment. Equally, you might have a chunk dealing with the make and model of a particular gun to illustrate the fact that the protagonist is a military expert.
I’m not sure how we’re going to identify where and when those diversions are appropriate, and how to bring them in.
My instinct is that human tweaking will be needed here.
Of course, training with a wide range of books might just surprisingly solve the problem. I’m not certain though!
What do you think?
Part 3 is up and… it actually works better than I expected
Share your results when you’ve got something!
looking good as always.
On my side of things, I’m coming at it from the other direction - starting with developing a sound story, and trying to work that down into a series of prompts for individual scenes and paragraphs.
trying out the character based method I posted above, I’ve found it’s certainly possible to get down to a scene breakdown. I’ve been doing lots of editing of the results to steer the story - and from a writer’s point of view, it’s gratifying that this works well to improve the story.
Your system should be pretty robust with what gets thrown into it as far as background, story so far, etc. is concerned, so I think putting the two together will work in the end.
I’ve also experimented with getting gpt3 to write a film script as an intermediate stage.
Why?
Because a screenplay is a very structured, and concise way to tell a story, so that gets the scaffolding of a scene done quickly.
The idea is that you can then take the screenplay and get it to novelise from there, adding description, and literary work.
When it comes to creating actual passages of text from prompts (I’m using vanilla text-davinci-002 -so no training)
my current thinking is the prompt needs:
1 characters appearing in a scene:
2The story so far:
3Summary of last paragraph
4Text of last paragraph
5Summary of next paragraph
And it will produce
6the text of next paragraph:
This produces a couple of problems:
Problem: length decay…
You’ll need to feed it a good strong paragraph 1 to give it a good idea of what length to use for the next one.
However, gpt3 is lazy, and responses will tend to get shorter and shorter until we’re just left with a response that’s similar to the summary.
One solution is to specify a length… and cheat.
If your prompt says
Text of last paragraph (use at least 100 words)
But then for the paragraph to be generated, say:
Text of next paragraph (use at least 500 words):
Then gpt3 will know it has to raise its game for the next paragraph.
Problem: voice decay
In the same way, the voice and style of the prose also decays.
If you start off your first paragraph with a very strong character voice, there will likely be less and less of that voice as the writing continues.
Solutions:
I’m tempted to say we have a “tone of voice” prompt in it every time, including a section of prose, but that seems like it’d be expensive.
Another alternate would be to fine-tune with only books in similar styles. Again, I don’t know how well it’d work.
A third method would be to write every (say) 10th paragraph manually to keep the style in check
As a shorthand, I’m trying little cues in the “text of new paragraph” prompt. For example:
(writing style: hard boiled fast moving descriptions with active language)
(writing style: lots of metaphors and descriptions of people, places and feelings)
(writing style: highly detailed descriptive)
This doesn’t work very well, but does have some effect, I think.
Problem: detail of prompts
The “summary of next paragraph” needs to be incredibly tightly written.
It should never use “him, her, they” but always include names.
It should be a very clear set of instructions - far more succinct and well crafted than we’ve been generating automatically up to now. The kind of waffly language that we tend to get from expanding plot summaries won’t cut it.
In creating prose, Gpt3 tends to:
It needs to be both more expansive, and more constrained.
Doing a four-stage rewrite helps with (a) and (c). Reduce the temperature to about .3: put in the prompt
Text of last chunk
And
Summary of next chunk
Then run the following question (sorry about making this a 4 step re-write, but I can’t find phrasing that works any other way):
Which statements in “text of last chunk” contradict those in “summary of next chunk”?
Once you have the results of this, add them to the prompt and run:
rewrite “text of last chunk” resolving these inconsistencies:
Next do:
Which actions in “text of last chunk” are repeated in “summary of next chunk”?
And then:
Edit “text of last chunk”. delete repeated actions:
(b) is trickier. It’s a very subtle part of the writer’s art to decide and place details. When do you want to describe a character, and when do want to leave them faceless? When is a good time to stop the plot and concentrate on the atmosphere? What kind of observation on the human condition would make sense for this character to arrive at at this moment? How should you trail a small detail that will come up later in the story?
It’s possible there are some formulaic answers to some of these questions, but it’s complicated, and has to do with overall rhythm and style. It’s also where highly original comparisons and interactions come together. Maybe this is the bit you need to be an intelligent, conscious entity to think about….
More than one way to skin a cat…
I think we’re going to need to head in both directions.
We’ll need a robust strategy for developing the complex background material and structures and style cues that a novel needs in order to be coherent, but we’ll also need a good quality trained model for generating the actual text.
And it’s done!!
Note: still some bugs to work out, but it works in principle. I might come back tot his, but y’all are welcome to take it and run with it. See if you can fix the repetition bug.
Nice work, Dave. I appreciate you showing the full process, and not editing out the challenges. The troubleshooting and associated thought process is quite useful.
Fascinating work.
Im goong to post some of my own work soon on gothub and youtube.
I think the solution to your repetition problem is going to be human intervention and massive training sets…
Okay I’ve come back to this project with AutoMuse3 with some new ideas!
It’s pretty rough right now. It tends to really go off the rails. One time, it blew up the coffee shop, killing all the characters. Another time, one of the characters left to go to work and it got stuck in an infinite loop having everyone saying goodbye. So there’s still work to do! But I think I’m onto something here. Just a little bit more sophistication and dynamic control, and it will be able to simulate several characters for an arbitrary length of time.
The prose-writing part is probably going to require a lot of prompt engineering or finetuning. Well, all of this could benefit from finetuning, but it’s off to a great start. Here’s the code:
And here’s a companion video explaining it and demonstrating it:
What if we have a fully written story and we just want to rewrite it in the voice of a certain author/book, and/or add dialogue from a certain time period, would AutoMuse3 be good for that or is there a different/simpler method?
Not yet but I am thinking about a “Prose Fixer” thing
Here’s the most recent work:
Siendo un tema tan interesante sería de agradecer poder disponer la traducción simultanea también en español.
Un cordial abrazo
What happened to the AutoMuse repo? I was hoping for the chance to play with this – very interesting stuff!
Continuing with my previous question (for rewriting a story in the voice of a different author, etc.)… Maybe this would work if OpenAI made it possible: I assume if we fine tuned a model using our own story, then asked GTP-3 to write a story, it would write a similar story (maybe have to give a prompt of the outline to make sure it is in the same order). If we fine tuned another model using text from our different author and passed the output from the first model into the second model, it would both have our story and have the voice of the different author. Would that work? Is that possible?
I think that actually wasn’t a good idea. Instead, what if you fine tune with both your story and a different author’s text, then prompt GPT-3 to rewrite your story in the voice of the other author?