Show HN: Graph-based AI for longform writing
Very interesting! I&#x27;m giving it a try now, a few thoughts:<p>1. The default &quot;Node 1&quot; etc titles on cards is unfortunate. I feel like I want to fix it, but I don&#x27;t think there&#x27;s actually any reason to fix it. Generated passage&#x2F;subsection titles would be nice.<p>2. I think I see how the final text is produced (convert to a text node, generate text), but it wasn&#x27;t very clear to me.<p>3. &quot;Events&quot; isn&#x27;t that clear to me. Should I just add details I like to that? Or focus on plot? Do I actually write final text here?<p>4. I hope your budget is OK! I&#x27;ve been writing some tools like this and even a short story can add up to $1+ in GPT API costs. (Though maybe I&#x27;m being too generous in my GPT prompts&#x2F;responses.)<p>4b. Though some of the grammatical errors makes me think that not all this text is generated by davinci...?<p>4c. This really went off the rails... I gave the text &quot;Jane met Joe on Tinder. Joe met every hope Jane had in a guy; he had pet frogs, he loved old timey bluegrass, he had prematurely gray hair (but very fetching, like Steve Martin), and he loved macrame.&quot; and it generated &quot;The first date went well. In fact, it went so well that they canceled their other plans for the evening and spent the rest of it making out on Joe&#x27;s living room floor in front of his record player, listening to Béla Fleck&#x27;s that&#x27;s my wife album on repeat, quoting which was wa, according to Joe, basically the gayest thing he could possibly own; the world and therefore should hot and perfect as he wanted her to know that she was getting fallenless with her affections if she didn&#x27;t immediately start calling him daddy. He also bought her an, but he only did it because he thought she&#x27;d be terrified of him otherwise, and in experience left them in their vase when they got home from their date to reinforce home the fact that despite being so, theoretically hom older than her and having utterly choose at cool flowersut, surprately respectable into puuming inc when disteteen-go into handy me he&quot; ... that&#x27;s a lot of not-words!<p>5. I got confused about focus and how the Summarize&#x2F;etc buttons appear. If you click on a text field it doesn&#x27;t focus the card that contains the text field. I spent a somewhat embarrassing amount of time looking for those buttons after I made my first card :)<p>6. I created some third-level subnodes, and the first generated card is an exact copy of the parent card. I would have expected it to just be the first part of it.<p>7. Though I realize it&#x27;s not clear to me how any of that is supposed to work. I realize I entered a setup for my first section (first card in the first level of nodes), but I didn&#x27;t include events that actually would lead to the next card at that level. GPT kind of filled that in, and so maybe that copied card was appropriate.<p>8. I think I&#x27;m supposed to write a story by creating the setup, getting an outline, and then going down all the way until I&#x27;ve reached &quot;finished&quot; text, and then each time I&#x27;ve finished all of a parent&#x27;s nodes children I should summarize...? Do I just not summarize leaf nodes?<p>9. Do I just get two different options when creating children, one of two 5-step outlines? Sometimes neither is what I want. 5 also feels like it&#x27;s too many at some levels.<p>10. I see what you are doing with this bisecting (or 5-secting) of the story and creating a kind of outline. But this still means very big jumps. Like if I go down 3 levels then there&#x27;s actually a lot of distance between those leaf nodes when adjacent parts of the story belong to different top-level nodes.<p>11. Maybe a better approach would be a sliding window, where there&#x27;s no &quot;graph&quot; but instead a kind of fractally-expanding linear flow, with an ever-blurrier summary as you get further from the area of the story being actively developed.<p>11b. I mention this because I&#x27;m getting continuity errors. Which is also just really hard to fix. But when I start at the beginning and I&#x27;ve started the outline, I&#x27;ve committed to the beginning getting to a particular next step (also I want it to get to that next step).<p>11c. In general I&#x27;ve noticed GPT really wants to advance the story too quickly. Like I had a passage about someone meeting a person on Tinder, and Jotte suggested outlines where that was broken down into events that led to them being married. The breakdown should <i>still</i> be strictly about meeting the person on Tinder (and then a bunch of character building detail... this isn&#x27;t a news report). It&#x27;s going to be hard to keep GPT from trying to &quot;complete&quot; the story when the whole concept is that it should only complete events described in the parent node, and leave what comes next to the next card.<p>11d. This feels like it&#x27;s not going to be able to handle foreshadowing. Or at least I&#x27;m not seeing it. The person the main character meets on Tinder is secretly an alien catfishing for people to kidnap. The story shouldn&#x27;t give that away, but the reader should feel like something is fishy.<p>11e. If I have ideas about the style of the story and exposition, where do I put them? Events? Will it respect these as notes to inform its composition, and not literal events in the story? Or is Theme where I put the meta-guidance? (I don&#x27;t understand theme... it feels like it&#x27;s suggestions for the voice of the writing, but that shouldn&#x27;t shift as often as theme shifts.)<p>I&#x27;m also getting some exceptions, I copied them here: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gist.github.com&#x2F;ianb&#x2F;42e8d906b1c2dfbd32e00dff907e6122" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gist.github.com&#x2F;ianb&#x2F;42e8d906b1c2dfbd32e00dff907e612...</a>