Show HN: Graph-based AI for longform writing

Current text transformers are horrendous in writing long form stories (ie, longer than 1 page).

Because they don't have a concept of long-term memory. It has to keep everything in its short term memory (the context window), which is at most 2k words right now. Everything else is discarded, so the AI is unable to keep track of past events.

This AI probably tries to summarise past events into short summaries. Sort of like how humans don't remember details of past events (What did you eat last week), only tracking important or unusual events. This helps massively optimize the memory of the AI

Novels are probably the grand challenge in text-AIs, because they require multiple things.

1. Long term memory

2. Multi-party state tracking (What happened to whom, how is relationship graph between multiple characters changing, what is happening in the background, or the world, despite not being mentioned in the text explicitly)

3. Multi-party theory of mind (The AI must infer the internal mental state of characters despite not being explicit in text)

4. Accurate understanding of human motivations/desires, which are the driving force behind stories.

As such, AIs that can write long fictional stories is also capable of: 1. Deception (Plot twist/surprises) 2. Emotional manipulation (Pulling your heart strings) 3. Long term planning (The simulated characters need to plan long term, with an effect on the world-state)

Needless to say, it will be extremely dangerous. But that AI will also master therapy, sales, supervising children, customer service etc, as it now has an strong understanding of human behaviour.

Still, all of that is quite a few years away. In the meantime, AIs that can assist human fiction writers is very possible, humans do the long term tracking and comprehension, the AI can help fill in dialogue, polish up writing styles, describe scenery or objects etc.

Novel writers are a great testing ground despite limited economic value, because novel writing AIs are risk-free and error-tolerant. Novel writers are generally also extremely excited about AIs, unlike artists.

Long story short, I worked through a series of concepts with a designer friend last year using GPT-3 with a similar target: longform. Our approach was not interactive, but rather that the need was for a batch mode, overnight tool.

I'm not really interested in having yet another JS library interrupt my real-time flow, which is quite quick, but is easily interrupted and I feel like we're at an inflection point where between grammarly and gmail our flow is something we remark about having when we read Csikszentmihalyi 20 years ago.

The results were pretty startling when using a corpus of text from a great writer, but less so with a smaller corpus of wanna-be David Foster Wallace work.

The one part of this that caused me to pause is this:

https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/2277...

That is, the pre-order traversal vs. depth-first-search.

I'm outta my depth here not having a PhD in data structures and algorithms. My point is that from an authoring and marketing perspective, it would be clearer to me as an outsider and consumer, if the animation writ large the difference in terms of node traversal. Even after reading the stack exchange, you can see that I'm not alone in parsing this as the comments indicate the confusion. Without turning this into a Turing lecture, there must be a prosthetic device for understanding the deeper, underlying infrastructure.

Can you help?

Novel writing is like the training ground for emotional intelligence in AIs. Fiction writing itself is not economically important, but the skills learnt from it is.

As a passionate hobby writer myself. I say you should actually go and try the writing tools, sudowrite/verb.ai are examples. Once you start using them, you start realizing how much they suck at writing stories, and your worries will go away. Unlike art AI, fiction writing AI has not really improved significantly. The core challenges are unsolved since the days of GPT-2.

There's also little research money coming in. Having a truthful, helpful, inoffensive AI is the polar opposite of what you want in a story AI, which should be deceitful, aggressive, and offensive.