Sudowrite: The Little AI Writing Engine That Could (But Ethically Probably Shouldn’t)

Get rid of writer’s block by having AI write everything for you!

Sudowrite is an AI writing tool that offers creative writing assistance for anyone who wants to overcome writer’s block. You’re most likely to benefit from using this application if you want to write a long, novel-length story.

Sudowrite’s insightfully arranged, slightly chaotic main page playfully guides visitors through a list of peppily summarized writing tools. As you scroll down, new sections with bold titles, quippy sub-headings, and huge double-time video demonstrations of each feature flash across the screen.

This AI writing tool appeals to Gen Z’s TikTok attention spans, penchant for one-stop-shop solutions, and appreciation of aesthetics. That’s certainly how it got me; I decided to review Sudowrite almost entirely because my first impression of the site was, “Ooh, pretty!”

Touché, Sudowrite–consider your target audience reached.

Anyways, let’s get into the details, starting with the age-old question “Do I have to pay for this?”

Free Trial

When you first make an account, Sudowrite doesn’t ask for any kind of payment or email confirmation! As a broke college-age writer tired of clicking into would-be helpful sites only to hit a paywall, this was extremely refreshing — at least until I got further into the sign-up process.

When you visit Sudowrite’s homepage, it claims that the service costs just $10/month after a free trial period. Apart from failing to inform you of how long that trial period is, this pricing is only accurate if you purchase their yearly “Hobby & Student” plan.

Further answers to these omissions hide in plain sight: click on the gear settings sign, and underneath your name and profile icon, there’s a small colored bar with text that reads “10,000 of 10,000 credits left”.

Credit System

Sudowrite’s credit-based system is unique from other services’ “one-week free trial” in many ways, especially in the way that it’s just so. much. worse!

The credit system does carry over to the full service, too. When you buy subscriptions in one of the three tiers — Hobby and Student, Professional, and Max — you get a pre-set number of credits. Hoping to budget my free trial credits, I searched the homepage for any sign of how much each feature “costs” and couldn’t find a specific breakdown.

Are the credits fairly proportioned for sufficient exploration without needing to get a subscription? No.

Do they give you just enough credits to get into it and then yank you out mid-edit? Pretty much.

In the end, I had no luck finding any concrete numbers. As far as I can tell, Sudowrite’s credit-based features’ costs are randomly assigned at your inconvenience. On the plus side, I got an extra 5,000 “Grace” credits without prompting in the middle of using the initial 10,000 (though still not enough to fully explore).

Pricing

Membership costs range between decent to not worth it.

• Hobby & Student monthly — $19/month for 225,000 credits
• Hobby & Student yearly — $10/month for 225,000 credits
• Professional monthly- $29/month for 1,000,000 credits (doubled recently from 450,000 as part of a 50% off promotion)
• Professional yearly — $22/month for 1,000,000 credits
• Max monthly — $59/month for 2,000,000 credits
• Max yearly — $44/month for 2,000,000 credits

ShortlyAI is another similar software that also claims to be a writer’s block curing tool. Shortly does NOT require credits, so even though the $65/month price is more expensive, overall it’s less restrictive than Sudowrite.

Capabilities and Limitations

How truthful is Sudowrite’s feature marketing?

The “Visualize” feature used in a paragraph of my writing:

In this paragraph, I described the morning routine of a young woman with long black hair who’s dissatisfied with her home and work life. One moment in the paragraph depicted her looking into a mirror briefly in the bathroom as she gets ready for the day.

A cool feature that generates standard AI art content. The images are loosely accurate to the reference paragraph I fed it plus plenty of random nonsense happening in the background.

User Experience

Overall, Sudowrite is a straightforward AI writing tool with a diverse selection of resources available to new and existing users, including detailed prompts and clear instructions for how to use each feature.

Overall Evaluation

Functionality — Are features advertised realistically or overhyped?

• Realistic: Most features do perform the functions they advertise. It’s a bit concerning how Sudowrite generates entire stories using Story Engine, Write, and Expand (among other tools) so that the “author” barely needs any creative or critical thinking to write their own novel.
• Overhyped: As with most AI software, the quality of prompting yields the quality of the output. Features like Feedback only work after the user’s done all the work.

Accessibility — How easy is it to use?

• There’s a Discord server Sudowrite users can join.
• The Sudowrite Manual and Story Bible guide are freely available resources for all new users.
• YouTube video tutorials exist, like this one.

Affordability — Is the price worth it for what you get?

• Not really. Other AI writing programs, like ShortlyAI, offer similar monthly and yearly fee plans without the restriction of a credit system.
• The only improvements in higher tiers seem to be access to more credits.
• Fortunately, when you finish the free trial, you can still access your writing in Sudowrite even if you don’t get the paid version.

Ethicality — Where does Sudowrite source its data from?

• Sudowrite’s website directly states that the software draws from GPT 3 and GPT 4 and doesn’t elaborate further.
• The recent controversy between Sudowrite and AO3 indicates that Sudowrite’s data-sourcing practices aren’t as ethical as they claim to be.

Creativity — Does it accurately match style, provide helpful feedback, and effectively rewrite?

• Feedback is helpful if you already have a solid body of work.
• Style, regardless of prompting specificity, is fanfiction-esque.
• If you already have done most of the work yourself, Story Bible just restates, often word-for-word, what you wrote.

Conclusion

Sudowrite is an AI writing buddy that claims to have an abundance of interesting features. Many are valid claims and genuinely useful like Describe and Analysis & Feedback. On the other hand, most of Sudowrite’s other supposed creative skills are either too good to be true if you don’t already have most of the writing done yourself (Rewrite, Expand, and Story Engine), or too ethically ambiguous for me to feel comfortable recommending the application as anything other than a lazy writer’s plagiarism playground.