- easy to access, non-technical and cheap as chips
[1] Background
This short article is written to encourage anybody who enjoys writing fiction to experiment with AI Storytelling tools. In particular it demonstrates how you can easily access a particular tool, OpenAI’s Playground https://beta.openai.com/playground and have fun asking it to help you develop some character backgrounds, or indeed, many other useful aspects of a story.
OpenAI offers a range of AI tools which companies use to build their own products. You can read about that here https://openai.com/blog/gpt-3-apps/ but this is not a technical article. The key point here is that OpenAI offers something called the Playground which you can access through your browser. There is a process of signing up but you do not need (at the moment at least) to part with your credit card details.
Once you have the Playground screen open in your browser (I use Chrome) you will see a text entry screen in the middle and some settings down the righthand side. Your MODE setting (at the top) should be ‘Complete’. The further settings used here are summarised at the end of the relevant section and there is a lot of support information available elsewhere about what each setting does. You are ready to begin.
[2] Developing a character
Assume that you have a minor character who you would like some background on. Our prompt to OpenAI might be:
Charles is a character in a book. We know that he is a time traveller from about three hundred years in the future. We also know that he is in trouble with the authorities there for disturbing the pattern of time. Please list 6 useful headings to be used for writing an interesting description of his background.
Now we press the SUBMIT button at the bottom of the screen. After a few seconds we get an answer something like this, as a numbered list.
Early Life
Time Traveler Training
First Experiences as a Time Traveler
Charles’s Views on Time travel and Its Dangers
Why Charles is in Trouble with the Authorities
How Charles Hopes to Fix His Situation
The reason for first asking for some useful headings is that this gives the AI a starting point for the next prompt. Below the answer enter the prompt.
Thank you. Now please expand each heading into one or two paragraphs.
It is doubtless silly to be saying Please and Thank you to an AI, but before long they will be rather more intelligent than us so it is wise to get into good habits.
Note. You may receive an error message in red at the bottom of the screen at some point saying something like: This model’s maximum context length is 4097 tokens, however you requested 4141 tokens etc Please reduce your prompt; or completion length. If so then you can either trim or delete earlier prompts you have given, or simply move the ‘maximum length’ slider to the left.
Back to our prompt. Press the SUBMIT button again and you start to see a response. You may have to press SUBMIT once or twice more if it stops. In our case the response included the following:
Early Life: Charles was born into a wealthy family in the year 2300. He grew up with all the advantages that money could buy, including access to the best schools and tutors. As a result, he is extremely intelligent and well-educated. However, his privileged upbringing also made him somewhat spoiled and arrogant.
First Experiences as a Time Traveler: Once he had completed his training, Charles’s first task as a time traveler was to observe key events in history firsthand . He found this work fascinating, but also frustrating at times because he couldn’t interact with anyone or change anything about what happened. Still, it gave him an unparalleled education on humanity’s past which prepared him for his future career of helping people from other eras fix problems in their own times.
Why Charles Is In Trouble With The Authorities? Unfortunately, during one of his visits to Earth’s distant past, something went wrong and caused major changes to the timeline. As a result, when Charles returned home to his own era authorities were waiting for him accusing of causing chaos & disturbing the natural order of things by altering historical events.
If any of this is useful, prompts can be used to ask the AI to expand on a particular point. Alternatively the answers can be deleted and another attempt made, for example to generate different headings. The OpenAI Playground does not (as yet) have sufficient memory allocated to your query to follow your entire plot. It can make a substantial contribution though for many of us.
[Settings: Maximum length: 3593, Model: text-davinci-002, Temperature: 0.5, Frequency penalty: 2, Presence penalty: 2 other settings default]
[3] What does it cost?
The example above cost just USD 0.04 or so, so re-running it a few times for a variety of ideas is quite affordable. We received a free credit of USD18 on signing up and have not yet run through that. Once you are paying you buy credits on a ‘pay as you go’ basis, so no commitment is needed. Indeed, if you are about to sign up to an AI Storytelling tool who want a large up-front commitment then you should check that the OpenAI playground isn’t a better option.
[4] Brief note on our project
Cybah Stories www.cybah.com aims in the long term to provide free fiction writing based around the lives and adventures of a group of fictional British ‘models’, all of whom are created by AI. We hope in time that their complete and interesting stories will be created by AI, and that our models will themselves have an existence on social media and elsewhere. it may be some time until all of this is possible. We do think it is inevitable though.
