The Novel(-ish) Writing AI

For National Novel Writing Month, an AI & I attempt to co-write a novel during the 30 days of November. Wish us luck, we'll probably need it!

Supplies

• A DeepAI account
• Creativity

Step 1: The Project Video

Step 2: The Idea

To take on the challenge of writing 50,000 words during the month of November for National Novel Writing Month, also known as NaNoWriMo, I partnered up with an AI. What could possibly go wrong?

The idea is that I, the human, will write the first paragraph of the text and then hand it over to my AI buddy to write the rest of the story.

Step 3: The AI

For this project I used the DeepAI Text Generation API, which can generate paragraphs of text based on a sentence or partial sentence. It will predict subsequent text from the input you give it.

From playing around with it, I've noticed that it works a lot better when you input a bit more than just one sentence, and the results are also better if you leave your last sentence unfinished.

To successfully write 50,000 words by the end of November, we need to write roughly 1,667 words every single day. Sadly, the AI doesn't always generate enough text based on the input, but no worries!

It has been said that a picture is worth 1,000 words and luckily there is an AI that can generate images out of text. To create the images to go with the text, I used the DeepAI Text To Image API.

Step 4: The Novel(-ish) Writing Bot

To use the DeepAI APIs in a nice and efficient way, I created an HTML Bootstrap page with two text input fields, one to generate a text and one to generate an image.

Some JavaScript magic gets the input from the input fields, calls the DeepAI APIs and returns either the text or the image to the webpage. If you would like to try it yourself, you can experiment with the code in attachment!

Step 5: The Novel(-ish)

The novel itself is going great, thank you for asking! Today is only day 8, but so far we're at 5,382 written words and 18 images that are worth 1,000 words each, totalling at 23,382 words so far. The texts aren't always very readable or coherent, but if word count is what you're after for National Novel Writing Month, AIs have you covered!

I'll leave you with this beautiful example of Day 7 – The Story of Pizza with it's corresponding image. Please note that the text in bold was written by me, the human, the rest was generated by the AI. You can find all the generated stories, or the full novel-ish, here on our website.

If there’s one thing I love, it’s pizza! Pizza’s are absolutely amazing, because no matter what you put on them, they taste great. You can even fold them in half, they still taste awesome! But the one thing I wish I could change about pizza is it’s really the only way a pizza is available. If you have any of that crap on you, put it in the fridge for 20-30 seconds. It’s a great machine for making cool pizza because it tastes perfect. But replace a piece that’s already in a fridge for too long. Now what? The best way to make cool pizza out of ice cream? You won’t matter. Just keep cold pizza cool.