AI writing apps and software CST – top 10 – top 50

(Updated frequently) A long list of writing software that uses AI, quoting their by-lines (more than 50 now)

Geoff Davis AI writing and art
It’s not that bad.. quite useful in fact….

AI text processing writing software, also including Notes Story Board (zooming), Granthika, Scrivener.

Includes NLP and text generation techniques.

October 2021, updated ocasionally – last Nov 2022

After The Deadline

https://www.afterthedeadline.com/

“We use artificial intelligence and natural language processing technology to find your writing errors and offer smart suggestions. Our technology is available under the GNU General Public License. ”

AI Writer

http://ai-writer.com/

“Generate unique text with the ai article writer”

Anyword

“Generate effective copy for ads, emails, landing pages, and content. ”

Articoolo

http://articoolo.com/

“Create unique textual content in a flash”

Autocrit

“The best self-editing platform available for a writer. ”

AX Semantics from Gartner

Increase Your Online Sales With Better Automated Content Writing

Our easy-to-use Natural Language Generation software helps you and your team

Conversion AI

https://www.conversion.ai/

“Your AI copywriting assistant. Now Jarvis can help you write blog articles, social media posts, sales letters, and even books. ”

Copyshark

https://www.copyshark.ai/

“AI powered software that generates ad copy, product descriptions, sales copy, blog paragraphs, video scripts & more.”

Copysmith

https://app.copysmith.ai/

“Supercharge Your Content Brainstorming with AI. ”

Broca

https://www.usebroca.com/

“Create content for every stage of your marketing funnel. Start your first campaign free. Broca generates content for ads, blogs, email, social media, and more using AI. ”

Essaybot

https://www.essaybot.com/

“EssayBot is your personal AI writing tool. With your essay title, EssayBot suggests most relevant contents. It paraphrases for you to erase plagiarism concerns”

Explain Paper

Upload a paper, highlight confusing text, get an explanation. A better way to read academic papers.

https://www.explainpaper.com/

FloWrite

https://www.flowrite.com/

“Flowrite turns words into ready-to-send emails, messages, and posts in your personal style”

Galactica (from Meta – now offline)

https://galactica.org/
“Researchers are buried under a mass of papers, increasingly unable to distinguish between the meaningful and the inconsequential.”

This has been taken offline after three days as it produced too much false information, which is acceptable with normal language production as it can be easily spotted and edited, but not science, where people don’t know the topics, and can’t tell randomly generated science waffle from actual scientific results.

Gavagai Explorer

“Optimize customer perception, boost operational excellence,
manage brand reputation, and detect potential crisis instantly. ”

GenerateAI

https://www.scalenut.com/generate

“With fast, easy, and effective content generation, artificial intelligence is here to take away writing blues”

GoCopy

https://gocopy.io/

“Make writing easier. Team up with our AI-powered writing assisitant”

Grammarly Business

https://www.grammarly.com/

“Professional Communication For Your Team

With Grammarly Business, every member of your team can compose credible, mistake-free writing that makes your business look good.”

Granthika (not AI)

https://granthika.co/

“The writing super-app built by writers.”

Headlime

https://headlime.com/

“Writing copy is time-consuming and difficult. Headlime’s artificial intelligence can take your thoughts and turn them into words, saving you tons of time so you can focus on what matters: your business”

Hemingway App 

https://hemingwayapp.com/

“Makes your writing bold and clear.”

Hypotenuse AI

https://www.hypotenuse.ai/

“AI Generated Product Descriptions. Automatically generate copywriting for your e-commerce website in seconds. ”

iAwriter
From Linus Lee.

See Merlot.

A focused environment where you can write freely. Now with lasers.
(iA is information architecrure.)

Writer

Ink For All

“Explore over 40 AI writing tools for short form content, ads, email, product, startups and more. ”

https://inkforall.com/writing-tools

Jarvis AI

“Artificial intelligence makes it fast & easy to create content for your blog, social media, website, and more!”

Jarvis has been renamed Jasper because it was the name of Tony Stark’s AI assistant in the Marvel movie Iron Man. Marvel sent a C&D to them. So hello…

Jasper AI

“Artificial intelligence makes it fast & easy to create content for your blog, social media, website, and more!”

Lightkey

https://www.lightkey.io/

“Write Smarter, with Confidence. Take your typing to the next level using Lightkey’s AI-powered text predictions in applications you use every day.”

manuscript.ai

The World’s fastest editing tool became 10x more faster after our latest update.

Merlot

From Linus Lee

See iAwriter

Merlot is a web-based writing app that supports Markdown. It replaces iA Writer

https://merlot.vercel.app/

Muse Creative Content Assistant (Muse CCA)

https://www.musecca.com/Welcome

“Create More. Work Less. 3 Easy Steps! ”

Neuroflash

“Your AI copywriting tool for more conversions with less work.”

NLPCloud

“Text understanding/generation (NLP), ready for production, at a fair price.
Fine-tune and deploy your own AI models. No DevOps required.” (Also has text to image using Stable Diffusion.)

NovelAI

“Driven by AI, construct unique stories, thrilling tales, seductive romances, or just fool around. Anything goes!”

Peppertype AI

https://www.peppertype.ai/

“Your Virtual Content Assistant. Generate better content copies in seconds with the power of Artificial Intelligence”

ProWritingAid (not AI)

“For the smarter writer.”

https://prowritingaid.com/

Sapling AI

https://sapling.ai/

“AI writing assistant for customer-facing teams”

Scrivener (not AI)

https://www.literatureandlatte.com/scrivener/

“Scrivener is the go-to app for writers of all kinds, used every day by best-selling novelists, screenwriters and non-fiction writers”

Story Software (includes Notes Story Board (not AI), Story Live AI (GPT-J), Story Lite) – from Geoff Davis (this blog author)

STORY SOFTWARE CREATIVE APPS

“The first and best 5 star story board text & images zooming notes app”

Story Live

“AI text generator and editor , with GPT-J Text Synth by Fabrice Bellard.”

https://storylive.com

Sudowrite

“Bust writer’s block and be more creative with our magical writing AI.”

https://www.sudowrite.com/

TextCortex

https://textcortex.com/

“Text Cortex uses its advanced AI to generate Product Descriptions, App Reviews, App Descriptions and many other marketing texts.”

Verse By Verse (poetry)

“Google’s New AI Helps You Write Poetry Like Poe”

https://sites.research.google/versebyverse/

Virtual Ghost Writer

“Writer’s block? Never stare at a blank screen again!”

https://virtualghostwriter.com/

Word AI

https://wordai.com/

“Automatically create human quality content with WordAi. WordAi uses artificial intelligence to understand text and is able to automatically rewrite your article with the same readability as a human writer”

Writesonic

https://writesonic.com/

“With Writesonic’s AI-powered writing tools, you can generate high-performing Ads, Blogs, Landing Pages, Product Descriptions, Ideas and more in seconds.”

Wordtune

https://www.wordtune.com/

“Your thoughts in words. Say exactly what you mean through clear, compelling and authentic writing.”

Writer! (Qordoba)

“AI writing, content intelligence, and AI writing assistants—these are the waystations for what will soon become just simply writing. Writing with the full breadth and depth of your objectives, audience, messaging, and brand at your fingertips.”

WritingAssistant

https://www.writing-assistant.com/

“The most powerful writing improvement software in the world. Powered by advanced artificial intelligence (AI) technology, WritingAssistant can assess and enhance your writing”

A Mountain of Pent Up Tears – children’s stories generated texts

Children’s stories this is part of the classic literature series on this blog, experiments in hybrid fiction. 

I turned out so fast, I barely looked back. (I turned to look, only to find the figure had gone.) What has gone before was the dark room.

In the far left corner lay a pile of books. The ones on the page, all full of life’s lessons; the black ones, I thought of the colorless, the dark books, my soul had never seen red in my life. These weren’t books of old stories. These were children’s stories told by old schoolboys, and children’s books have been around ever since:

This was written in the 1840s when young, red dwarfs lived in the forest. They wore their clothes brown and brown and purple. At the close of the story, the author makes the child a dwarf, the woods were too far for them to go, so they are made brown. His book is told like many children’s stories.

“This is where the forest is.”

“The forest, where do I go then?”

“In the woods. In the woods, as you said.”

“I, too, am brown.”

“Yes, I am. I am in the forest. It is the way of the forest.”

“And me?”

“Yes, too, me too.”

“And you too?”

“Yes, too.”

The forest is the only place in which these children can know what things are true. They see the forest as their only home. If they go away, then they see them as an enemy who must be conquered. But these children have all travelled over, and gone past. They’ve seen it all over again.

They know what the forest is; how it works, how things go. They can see everything. And for some reason they know that they are all in the same boat, that they can never cross over to other paths. So they know, even in that boat, what the forest means, and why it is there.

What’s behind the green, silver-tinted door. Where’s the white door? That’s not the forest, is it? The white door has never been there. What was behind that door, the door to the land?

They do not know why they were born into the woods. They think that the forest is God’s gift for them. But what’s there to be gifted for? They are the only ones, after all.

When asked how the sun comes out, and when asked why the sun comes out.

Answer: There is no one here who knows.

And they need not have seen the sun.

 


GD: the first 68 words of the generated text (above) was next used as the prompt to generate the text (below). The 68 words are shown in italics.


I turned out so fast, I barely looked back. (I turned to look, only to find the figure had gone.) What has gone before was the dark room.

In the far left corner lay a pile of books. The ones on the page, all full of life’s lessons; the black ones, I thought of the colorless, the dark books, my soul had never seen red in my life.  

There, I thought, was the door leading to what was yet to come. But in the darkness, an unseen figure, one I couldn’t yet recognize, looked from the left to the right, slowly. As it followed, my eyes scanned the walls, but I couldn’t find the same room. I reached out to touch the door, but the figure stayed, a blank shadow across the room, it never left the door. It seemed to vanish into nothingness.

Then came an accelerating sound, as the figure dropped, and it moved slowly back into the room.

“What have you done?” I cried, the words begins to rise up like a mountain of pent up tears. There, I found, was the door. It turned, and my body seemed to lift it, before the figure itself left to my side.

A smile appeared on my face as I looked at the room, the books filled a giant library with life and lessons, the black ones I had hoped would be my own in my own time, the colorless ones, the ones I’ve already read, the ones I’ve been looking for. They were to tell me what I would need to know, how to survive this night, to know the unknown. They were a path, a map.

In the darkest hall, the room I saw the figure enter, a pale shadow in the light. The place was dark, it was cold. He took me in, and  I felt he was going to kill me, he was taking me inside. The sound woke me, and I opened my eyes to find another shadow, a figure standing behind me. I didn’t know what he was, but I was in my own home.

That man walked towards me, eyes glow green, his eyes were gloomy, the healers he wore, his hair was matted with grey, it was grey that faded in between them. He was big, at least, if a little tall. At least I had grown the right size for this thing.  I don’t think his arms were big, so that is probably just his arms, or perhaps his face was too short for his eyes. His fingers were lank, the seated fingers were black, and  in the dimmest corner of his head was a hood, with no lights.

It was very dark, there was an open door beyond it. He held my hand like a…well, for I was small. I could tell the size of his hand. He had long grey hair in his hands. He held my hand, and I saw red, it was black, as if it was a red colour.

I thought, and in that moment, my skin was soft and shiny. In between my knees. So, I moved over and looked, in my hands, and there was a dark green hand, with red hands, I knew this was a shadow, but that doesn’t mean anything to him.

The first hand, the first hand was big, its face was black, it was large, for I was small. The black was green, its color was darker than red. I touched it, and it was cold.

The second hand was big, but the hands were dark, and had big fingers, the first hand was long and dark green, it was like a purse, I didn’t know how it was, but it was cold, in that moment, I froze.

I could only watch.

 


You can guess the original story from the image (below).

Little Red Riding Hood and Wolf

 

Photo credit https://www.publicdomainpictures.net/

All the Rubbish of a Great City – classic literature vs text generation

All the Rubbish of a Great City

 

From the series of classic literature vs the future…

All The Rubbish of a Great City

Part 1: No Sun Ever Since That Day

 

Dear Farewell

You may be glad to see your letter of 6th April last from me. You are still in the good humour of the last time, and I believe that the people will be kind and kind to you in your letters.

I hope you will send me the following on the 15th of June: 1st: to my brother, a messenger, and my wife; 2nd: my daughter; and to my sister; then my brother; and my sister to my husband; and my brother to my son; and my father to my son; and my daughter to my husband and sons; and to my daughter’s father.

It is impossible for me to perceive a trace of the abominable scenes which I have experienced. There are but a few houses destroyed, and most of them, that is, very pretty ones, and all are occupied with families, and a few shops: one street is covered with all the rubbish of a great city; its streets are of a grey nature; and the streets are all closed off by some heavy iron gate.

I take a seat in a corner of the square; and after taking food from a little table and taking a seat beside a shopkeeper, or at least an old man with a hat on, I look about me. Nothing remarkable is seen or seen; there is no ruin or any signs of destruction; you might as well go near the ruins of the pyramids. The women seem to be quite contented, and are making the little fires that are burning. We are very anxious, we are very sad, to see them.

As I was about to arrive at the coast, I was suddenly knocked out by the wind; my companions, who were not surprised, rushed to me. I lay in their arms, and told them I could not recover myself, and said it was time for my expedition to proceed.

I begged them to give me some of the best part of the sea to make my recovery. They assented, and then threw out with me a large quantity of salt that I could not bring home to myself, and I fell dead.

They gave me some of their gold as I lay dying.

I never heard of such an occurrence; I should have been ashamed to have done so; but I had too much hope in the fortune of the sea; for if I were lost by such misfortunes, one does not have what has been given him; for if the fortune be bad, man do have a right to hope.

They put me into the boat with their captain, Sir Richard, and took me back to the ship where we were sitting. I lay there several days; I thought I had done well, but they told me the fortune was the same; the sun set over the mountains that night, and gave no sun ever since that day.

My mind was so troubled about my condition, that I could not bear the noise of the ship, so I cried, and fell into a terrible state of sleep, and then lay, my head, and neck, and legs, down upon a bed.

[These words, which do not make any impression on the ear, should appear to prove the correctness of the saying.]

 


Original

Frankenstein  or The Modern Prometheus

Mary Wollstonecraft (Godwin) Shelley 1818

Letter 1

To Mrs. Saville, England.

St. Petersburgh, Dec. 11th, 17—.

You will rejoice to hear that no disaster has accompanied the commencement of an enterprise which you have regarded with such evil forebodings. I arrived here yesterday, and my first task is to assure my dear sister of my welfare and increasing confidence in the success of my undertaking.

I am already far north of London, and as I walk in the streets of Petersburgh, I feel a cold northern breeze play upon my cheeks, which braces my nerves and fills me with delight. Do you understand this feeling? This breeze, which has travelled from the regions towards which I am advancing, gives me a foretaste of those icy climes. Inspirited by this wind of promise, my daydreams become more fervent and vivid. I try in vain to be persuaded that the pole is the seat of frost and desolation; it ever presents itself to my imagination as the region of beauty and delight.

There, Margaret, the sun is for ever visible, its broad disk just skirting the horizon and diffusing a perpetual splendour. There—for with your leave, my sister, I will put some trust in preceding navigators—there snow and frost are banished; and, sailing over a calm sea, we may be wafted to a land surpassing in wonders and in beauty every region hitherto discovered on the habitable globe. Its productions and features may be without example, as the phenomena of the heavenly bodies undoubtedly are in those undiscovered solitudes. What may not be expected in a country of eternal light?

I may there discover the wondrous power which attracts the needle and may regulate a thousand celestial observations that require only this voyage to render their seeming eccentricities consistent for ever. I shall satiate my ardent curiosity with the sight of a part of the world never before visited, and may tread a land never before imprinted by the foot of man.

These are my enticements, and they are sufficient to conquer all fear of danger or death and to induce me to commence this laborious voyage with the joy a child feels when he embarks in a little boat, with his holiday mates, on an expedition of discovery up his native river. But supposing all these conjectures to be false, you cannot contest the inestimable benefit which I shall confer on all mankind, to the last generation, by discovering a passage near the pole to those countries, to reach which at present so many months are requisite; or by ascertaining the secret of the magnet, which, if at all possible, can only be effected by an undertaking such as mine.

…Etc…

Your affectionate brother,
R. Walton

Stanley Lying in his Lap – classic literature

Stanley Geoff Davis

 

Classic literature vs artificial intelligence – try and guess classic source.


 

Stanley Lying in his Lap

His face was almost as pale as his fur and the top part of his ears were slightly raised above the shoulder blades.

“Oh, God, what’s happened to me?” he said. “How on Earth have they left me here?”

He saw Stanley lying in his lap. He was standing there naked and looking at nothing. This seemed too strange and too inhuman. Stanley was dead. The whole floor was shaking with the force of the shaking.

“I don’t know,” he thought. “Something’s happened to me. My father… how? God, how have they… done it? What has gone wrong? Where are they?”

And then he heard Stanley’s voice. “Hello, Stanley!”

He turned and saw what looked like him, though his face looked a little too pale to be him, sitting in the chair next to the boy. His hair was in a mess and the fur hat had come loose. He was looking very, very… unwell.

“Why?” he asked.

“I said: ‘Why can you not see me?’ ”

“But…”

Stanley looked up at him. “Your mother… her eyes! Her… look!”

He smiled very happily. “They were mine.”

Stanley looked at the boy and then at him. “I see you. I see the world. I’m a fool. I’m too good for the world. But, in the end, what is this? The world that you can see? Where my father will come when he wakes up in this, this bed, on the other side of the wall, on the other side of this wall, and I won’t have to come here. Where will I find someone? Who? Where will I find him?”

It was the most beautiful and sweet thing he’d ever heard Stanley say.

“Where will I find him?”

Stanley tried to keep his eyelids closed, which was much too hard when the strange visage that appeared before him was so familiar. The picture seemed to say: I am your true self. Stanley imagined himself the girl. An alien being, a human girl at first glance but it should be said he certainly looked like a human girl. Even his eyes, that were always open, did not seem to be aware of his reality. He had no eyes.

The whole room. The whole world, that was. There was only a black box that Stanley had brought with him, a small metal cylinder with three small black valves, and there were four smaller tubes with levers that the girl would let loose with her nose, and she would let them press the small black buttons up and down, all of which were pressed with a certain sort of subtlety and even less subtlety than the valves, a certain kind of subtlety that Stanley supposed was just a thing he did like to do. Stanley was trying to help with the manipulation, but what needed to be done wasn’t to press the levers; it was to open the box, to allow the room to breathe.

His mind had become fragmented as Stanley was trying to find what seemed to be an easy solution and even some understanding of Stanley’s intentions. But even then he couldn’t see the girl from his point of view, and only saw the strange visage.

“I’ll send you an owl,” he said.

He wasn’t exactly sure whether his voice was hoarse and distant or how close to death he was. It was his first time talking to anyone in a foreign language.

“Do it,” said a small voice.

Stanley stood up, looked around and couldn’t believe that his bed was the only place the floor was covered. It was the first morning. But he remembered everything. It was the first real thing he had lost before he went in the hospital. He knew what it was.

“You did,” said the woman. “You did so, and I thought you had passed into a nightmare but something happened next thing and I came back.”

“Oh, you did,” said Stanley. “I guess I got over it.”

“I mean I thought you’d gotten over it but this time you didn’t,” the woman said to herself.


Metamorphosis
Franz Kafka 1915

One morning, when Gregor Samsa woke from troubled dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a horrible vermin. He lay on his armour-like back, and if he lifted his head a little he could see his brown belly, slightly domed and divided by arches into stiff sections. The bedding was hardly able to cover it and seemed ready to slide off any moment. His many legs, pitifully thin compared with the size of the rest of him, waved about helplessly as he looked.

“What’s happened to me?” he thought. It wasn’t a dream. His room, a proper human room although a little too small, lay peacefully between its four familiar walls. A collection of textile samples lay spread out on the table – Samsa was a travelling salesman – and above it there hung a picture that he had recently cut out of an illustrated magazine and housed in a nice, gilded frame. It showed a lady fitted out with a fur hat and fur boa who sat upright, raising a heavy fur muff that covered the whole of her lower arm towards the viewer.


See the other classic manglings in this blog.

Why Don’t Cannibals Eat Clowns?

Part of the text generation series – see blog index.

Why don’t cannibals eat clowns?

Because cannibalism doesn’t produce the same health benefits as killing clowns, you will have only about 60% of your body weight of body fat left, leaving you with less body fat and no protection against the other 50%.

By choosing a suitable size clown, you can take advantage of that. If I am in a small town and in need of a good pair of shoes, I’ll eat an ogre and I’ll have about 100% body fat and 70% of my body weight in a pair of shoes.

What the hell am I supposed to do, I am going to starve?!

In that case I would just have to get one of those, because those are probably my only options.

Also, by choosing a size bigger or smaller than I am currently supposed to be, you can take advantage of that as well. I’m going to give up on these shoes and use the boots instead. I mean that literally.

If I were in a small town where there is limited supplies, and the only food available is a variety of meats and fruit that I’m supposed to eat (such as a spider or something), I would eat some squirrel.

But if there’s too much food and no other choice, then I will instead go for the more dangerous monster I can get.

Now the issue of choice is just that these are all options. You don’t know what your favourite will be unless you decide to look into it.

For example, while you can choose a size small enough to be your “smallest” and go for the larger you’re going to be the bigger your body fat will be, it just won’t work like that. The bigger you get, the bigger your body fat will be so it’s not going to be as easy to “do the right thing.”

What you want is for your body fat to be close to your own body weight, which is probably going to be under 0 (the ideal is probably between 10 and 12).

Also what you want is to weigh on average only about 70-75% of your body weight (about 70lbs for one person, or roughly a fat person for another).

That’s what makes you a normal person.

2

Why don’t cannibals like clowns?

If they’re not being eaten by the clown, it’s because they’re so fat they don’t have a stomach, so they get crushed by the horse. In the real world, people’s appetite changes over time as well. A hungry hippo’s hunger will rise over time so an old horse gets eaten by a zombie, and so on.

In fact, a lot of people have to eat a lot in order to keep the hunger in check. And there are also the many social cues that cause our appetite to rise and fall over time. Food is good for us, because it tastes good and is a good source of calories. And when it’s too much, we have a panic attack. When it’s just right, we can just be happy to just eat a bag of popcorn. And once we’re just right, we can eat the popcorn and forget about it.

Why aren’t hippos getting eaten by horses? Because they have a digestive system that has to move in to the horse’s stomach first, or there will be too much food in the horse’s stomach. The idea that this food goes in straight through the horse’s digestive system is just silly.

The only way I’ve seen this food in the wild is that it was consumed by some people who were infected with a fungal life-form and got it into their digestive system and their appetite was just too great.

The best part about all this is that it’s simple enough to understand. The only thing that we can do is stop eating, to do that you just wait till your health gets better. If you could just get rid of all these stupid foods for a week or so and let your appetite return to the normal state, even better. It’ll be like the beginning of autumn in the wild, there’s just not enough sun to cook food like it used to be and it’ll feel like no one’s eating.

As you have experienced, I’ve never.


This from a joke in Geoff Davis’s new novel The Circular River which will be serialised on this website next week

Photo credit – the Solomon Islanders, feasting trough.

Guess the original classics – Born Into Slavery

Born into Slavery

This is a game to see if you can identify the original story author in the generated text below. It has a new title: Born Into Slavery. The generated text is followed by the classic story which was used as the prompt for the computer generation. For technical details see end.


 

Born Into Slavery

What would occur when the daughter came for a visit? Her daughter could not wish to come here but if she had to she was certain to be disappointed.

When her eldest daughter was in her early thirties, Mr. Smith thought it might be advisable to take her away with him to her own country. The time had been long since passed; what had gone before was now forgotten. She was quite happy at home, though she knew the consequences of her leaving the family.

Mrs. Smith, who lived on her own farm, was the more interested of the two, as she had a son she loved. She would rather she had one of her own daughters than, with him, a son. As it was she was obliged to take him along, though with a slight advantage in health and strength. The child, however, was well behaved, and was very fond of her.

The old couple would have had a child when Mrs. Smith was dead; the latter would not have died till Mr. Smith, as they thought, had been ninety years old, and with her, after him. The child, as they said, would live till old Mr. Smith had died; if that should prove impossible, they would have had an heir to one of the first families to the west of the river.

Mrs. Smith was still an old woman, she remembered; her eyes had become dim, her hands and feet were weak, her feet were dull and bent, her hands wrinkled and loose. A change from her old condition, she thought, would have been too much for her now. She had always been happy in her old condition, though always in the present mode.

This story made her do something she thought necessary for the little girl, and she went into the hall and sat down in the great old chair opposite to Mrs. Smith

A woman’s strength, she thought, was her knowledge of her father’s affairs. She knew that as long as her children could walk with her, they could not be married.

Her husband knew that too; he knew where he was going, what he was going to do, and was never the same afterwards. There was a very large number of children, her daughters, living abroad, in the most irregular manners. He had grown somewhat deaf, with a peculiar difficulty about their voices.

And Mrs. Smith never liked it when she was in any degree unhappy; she could not bear to see her men, much less her children, so miserable. Every time they came she wanted to have a chat with them. She was a woman of very little self-control, and she would have felt an extraordinary strain in talking to men in whom she was so anxious to be connected. She had grown quite aware of the dangers of these visits. She felt that she had the moral to avoid them. It was the same with her husband.

One of the dangers she had to observe was whether they should try to give her good advice on an important subject; then she could say nothing but good things about them. And she did not give you any reason why.

And so he took her into another house, where she found him dead. Here is the explanation of one of our own writers, that was born into slavery, and who has since been made a public writer.

In the first place, we say that his wife knew, but she did not have sufficient excuse for going back to him. For she had been married to his eldest son, whom he kept with her, but she had never had a son, not that she was less prone to be the subject of any kind of cruelty than any other woman.

She was a woman well grounded, and could be trusted not to become a mistress or to marry a knave. Now, the reason why Master Smith was the property of Mr. Smith was, that there were several houses there, called for the use of this one Mr. Smith, and he was not there, but was there at a different time; so he did not know him or know of his own family.

But of course this also became a reason for the destruction of his father’s property; for those other houses were to be used by Mr. Smith at a later time, and hence there was no excuse to lose them. And he knew of the condition of his father’s property, and that he had been made a public writer.

Now he said to Master Smith,
“What is the reason of your going to me at this time, that I do not go to him myself?”

“Well, I have said to him before, I do not go to him, because my father was in debt to you.”

“How did I know it?”

“He had a contract of sale of my house, for you had a lease for the premises. You and your father made a bargain, and did not pay; but he does me to make good my debt. He gave me this lease, but left the property to me.”

“What can I do for it?”

“I will not go with you.”

And Mr. Smith went away in his ship; and while he was doing this, he heard the voice of his father’s son, who was living in the ship, saying to him,

“Your father has made you a public writer, at a time when I should have told you everything that you ought to know about me; and he is coming to me to sell my property for your property, and that we must not meet there till the day after the feast.”

As it happened, at the end of his talk with Mr. Smith, who would then have come to him, he heard of the destruction of Mr. Smith’s house, and of the damage done, for a great many months afterwards, to the houses belonging to his son, because of that man’s writing; and Mr. Smith went away in his ship, that there might be no necessity of his telling Mr. Brown that he might not receive anything from him from him without reason.

And it was, at that time, a great pleasure to him to have the ship and his house in the same box, and he said nothing of it.


Original


Pride and Prejudice

Jane Austen 1813

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.

However little known the feelings or views of such a man may be on his first entering a neighbourhood, this truth is so well fixed in the minds of the surrounding families, that he is considered the rightful property of some one or other of their daughters.

“My dear Mr. Smith,” said his lady to him one day, “have you heard that Manorfield Park is let at last?”

Mr. Smith replied that he had not.

“But it is,” returned she; “for Mrs. Long has just been here, and she told me all about it.”

Mr. Smith made no answer.

“Do you not want to know who has taken it?” cried his wife impatiently.

You want to tell me, and I have no objection to hearing it.”

This was invitation enough.

“Why, my dear, you must know, Mrs. Long says that Manorfield is taken by a young man of large fortune from the north of England; that he came down on Monday in a chaise and four to see the place, and was so much delighted with it, that he agreed with Mr. Morris immediately; that he is to take possession before Michaelmas, and some of his servants are to be in the house by the end of next week.”

“What is his name?”

“Bingley.”

“Is he married or single?”

“Oh! Single, my dear, to be sure! A single man of large fortune; four or five thousand a year. What a fine thing for our girls!”

“How so? How can it affect them?”

“My dear Mr. Smith,” replied his wife, “how can you be so tiresome! You must know that I am thinking of his marrying one of them.”

“Is that his design in settling here?”

“Design! Nonsense, how can you talk so! But it is very likely that he may fall in love with one of them, and therefore you must visit him as soon as he comes.”

“I see no occasion for that. You and the girls may go, or you may send them by themselves, which perhaps will be still better, for as you are as handsome as any of them, Mr. Bingley may like you the best of the party.”

“My dear, you flatter me. I certainly have had my share of beauty, but I do not pretend to be anything extraordinary now. When a woman has five grown-up daughters, she ought to give over thinking of her own beauty.”

“In such cases, a woman has not often much beauty to think of.”

“But, my dear, you must indeed go and see Mr. Bingley when he comes into the neighbourhood.”

“It is more than I engage for, I assure you.”

“But consider your daughters. Only think what an establishment it would be for one of them. Sir William and Lady Lucas are determined to go, merely on that account, for in general, you know, they visit no newcomers. Indeed you must go, for it will be impossible for us to visit him if you do not.”

“You are over-scrupulous, surely. I dare say Mr. Bingley will be very glad to see you; and I will send a few lines by you to assure him of my hearty consent to his marrying whichever he chooses of the girls; though I must throw in a good word for my little Lizzy.”

“I desire you will do no such thing. Lizzy is not a bit better than the others; and I am sure she is not half so handsome as Jane, nor half so good-humoured as Lydia. But you are always giving her the preference.”

“They have none of them much to recommend them,” replied he; “they are all silly and ignorant like other girls; but Lizzy has something more of quickness than her sisters.”

“Mr. Smith, how can you abuse your own children in such a way? You take delight in vexing me. You have no compassion for my poor nerves.”

“You mistake me, my dear. I have a high respect for your nerves. They are my old friends. I have heard you mention them with consideration these last twenty years at least.”

“Ah, you do not know what I suffer.”

“But I hope you will get over it, and live to see many young men of four thousand a year come into the neighbourhood.”

“It will be no use to us, if twenty such should come, since you will not visit them.”

“Depend upon it, my dear, that when there are twenty, I will visit them all.”

Mr. Smith was so odd a mixture of quick parts, sarcastic humour, reserve, and caprice, that the experience of three-and-twenty years had been insufficient to make his wife understand his character. Her mind was less difficult to develop. She was a woman of mean understanding, little information, and uncertain temper. When she was discontented, she fancied herself nervous. The business of her life was to get her daughters married; its solace was visiting and news.


Notes

Prompt was 10-20 words from the original. GPT-2 system by Fabrice Bellard – see the site below for credits etc.
Made on my creativity app Story Live – please visit.

Text from Gutenburg free classic ebooks

A certain amount of cherry-picking of the most grammatical and interesting generated parts, but no actual editing (moving around of words or new words). Identifying names are changed.

More of these will be posted, see the index.

Guess the original literature classics – The Distant Shout of the Great Storm

Tower of Doom Distant Shout of the Great Storm

Can you identify the original story author used to prompt (start off) the generated text below? The title is also generated.

After, please visit Episode 2: The Bloody Tale.

The generated text is followed by the classic story which was used as the prompt for the computer generation. For technical details see end Notes.

Character names are changed if they appear from the original text. Only paragraph breaks etc. added for clarity.

Made on my creativity app Story Live


The Distant Shout of the Great Storm

It seems that I didn’t remember much, but my memory has been erased as much as any of the others. This was really quite disorienting. I just remember feeling that “something” was happening.

“Aaah… This… It feels right to be in this place… That sounds horrible… Do I really have to die? My thoughts are starting to run away from me, and I’m beginning to feel as if something is wrong with me, and I can’t be sure I know where I am… I can’t be sure of it but… I think I’m getting close, and maybe I can keep moving forward for just a little longer… ”

With that last part, I started moving my body. After moving for a moment, it looked like I was going to try to run away, but I got stuck. There was no way that I was going to pull myself back onto my feet. I needed to get back to my feet as quickly as possible. Maybe I couldn’t run anymore.

The Count, seeing his life gone away with himself, and his brother-in-arms and his friends at the foot of the steps to the entrance of the tower, seized the rapier, and plunged it in the back of his throat; a blow of his thumb, by which the blood rolled upon the floor like a thin sheet, sent the blade through his shoulder and through his spine, and severed his heart.

“Ah, this be the death of all the good! Now be thou slain, let thy spirit go in peace, and myself be dead.”

But as he made an attempt at speech, he heard in the distance the distant shout of the great storm. He saw the pallid faces of many of the men who had fallen of his hand; and with each one raised his dead hands with their dead fingers they raised it again before the black, black, black face of the death, while he staggered away from the tower, pale-faced and pale.

Meanwhile, through the crowd of the dead, a faint flame rose up behind the white curtain. And when the red flame blazed, from the tower, on the walls, all the dead went down behind the curtain.

And now the darkness of ages flowed out from one of the steps.

“For me now to make my home in the ashes of dead men,” said an old man that night in all his glory, on his grave, “if I would. I will see me now, in the sun of a new day, as I remember my old days; as they were, to me they were; and on this grave, and with this pale face, and in these hands, as they should be in my old hands, no more, to be, and to live, in these dead men.

“This world shall be dead, as is the world that came before it, when the world came to be in man’s body.

Then the prince went alone into the black apartment—and with an irresistible vigour, without fear, without regret, came to the last step of the staircase. He went there with a quickness, that neither his feet, nor his arm, nor the arm of any of the party, made a noise in motion, and with suddenness, that neither his feet nor his face, nor his body, or the last step of the staircase, could move, and for a moment the light of the candle, which was not disturbed, glittered.

At last he was called down the stairway; and as he sat down he perceived the presence of the death, and said aloud aloud:—

“Hail! O good man! What a night—and all things that are born of a man are, in the dark hours of his day, as dead as those which lie before him: and he in the dark days of his day, though all things that are born of him should be, in the light and sunshine of his day be, as they were before him, but all things that were before him were dead, in the dark hours of his day.”


Original


The Masque of the Red Death

Edgar Allan Poe 1842

The “Red Death” had long devastated the country. No pestilence had ever been so fatal, or so hideous. Blood was its Avatar and its seal—the redness and the horror of blood. There were sharp pains, and sudden dizziness, and then profuse bleeding at the pores, with dissolution. The scarlet stains upon the body and especially upon the face of the victim, were the pest ban which shut him out from the aid and from the sympathy of his fellow-men. And the whole seizure, progress and termination of the disease, were the incidents of half an hour.

But the Prince Prospero was happy and dauntless and sagacious. When his dominions were half depopulated, he summoned to his presence a thousand hale and light-hearted friends from among the knights and dames of his court, and with these retired to the deep seclusion of one of his castellated abbeys. This was an extensive and magnificent structure, the creation of the prince’s own eccentric yet august taste. A strong and lofty wall girdled it in. This wall had gates of iron. The courtiers, having entered, brought furnaces and massy hammers and welded the bolts. They resolved to leave means neither of ingress nor egress to the sudden impulses of despair or of frenzy from within. The abbey was amply provisioned. With such precautions the courtiers might bid defiance to contagion. The external world could take care of itself. In the meantime it was folly to grieve, or to think. The prince had provided all the appliances of pleasure. There were buffoons, there were improvisatori, there were ballet-dancers, there were musicians, there was Beauty, there was wine. All these and security were within. Without was the “Red Death”.

It was towards the close of the fifth or sixth month of his seclusion, and while the pestilence raged most furiously abroad, that the Prince Prospero entertained his thousand friends at a masked ball of the most unusual magnificence.

 

Notes

Prompt was 10-20 words from the original. GPT-2 system by Fabrice Bellard – see the site below for credits etc.
Made on my creativity app Story Live – please visit.

Text from Gutenburg free classic ebooks

Original 323 words from 2417. Generated is 712 words.

A certain amount of cherry-picking of the most grammatical and interesting generated parts, but no actual editing (moving around of words or new words). Identifying names are changed.

More of these will be posted, see the index.

 

Man and dog – text generation research – image prompt

Text Generation Study – image prompt

Go to Index of AI research

Dog and Man Poster
Dog and Man Poster

I found the writing prompt image (below), used in my online study, on a free comedy picture site. The guy looks quite young. Now, years later, all world famous!

Prompt image man and dog

Prompt image man and dog

Maxine is the dog, Bryan Riesberg the guy, now a film maker USA.

DOG

https://metro.co.uk/2020/11/13/adorable-corgi-loves-riding-the-subway-in-her-dads-backpack-13591355/amp/

MAN

http://bryanreisberg.com/

Maxine’s Instagram madmax_fluffyroad (600k followers)

https://www.instagram.com/madmax_fluffyroad/?hl=en

 

 

Computer-Human Hybrid AI Writing and Creative Ethics

Introduction

This blog is about my 2020 research into computer text generation and the effects on professional ands amateur writers. I am working on this topic at the University of the Arts London (UAL CCI, Dir. Mick Grierson).

No-one has asked creatives or writers what they think of the new ‘AI’ systems that generate readable text and so directly threaten their jobs, and could change the way people work forever (or don’t work forever). This is a topic that directly impinges on self-worth and financial worth in more ways than anyone can imagine, although plenty are worrying.

STUDY – ONLINE EXPERIMENT
August-October 2020

I devised an online experiment about this topic, allowing respondents to experiment with creating hybrid stories using a text generator. The people were all professional or serious amateurs (and a couple of small students) invited from my own creative writing software mailing list, a couple of writing forums, and a publisher’s writers’ forum, plus friends and relatives who generally use writing in their work. Credits are at the bottom.

Text generation

You might have heard of Google OpenAI’s GPT-2 and GPT-3. My experiment uses a generating system (Fabrice Bellard’s Text Synth, with permission)  based on GPT-2, that anyone can use. GPT-2 was used here as the model works well for idea generation and is more generally available at the time than GPT-3, which is much larger.

Note: The text generation and editing system is now a free online tool (creativity support tool or CST) at

Story Live writing with AI free online

The experimental results will feed into this blog (see Index for different aspects) and later an academic paper, and also a new book for the general public on the whole subject of computers, creativity and writing.

Please sign up for news and notifications – there’s a form on this page.

Brief description of the Study

Below is a graphic of the entire online study. Each block is a page and journey was left to right from top to bottom. The three text generation and editing experiments used a similar set up to the Story Live tool.

Each writing experiment – Caption, News and Fiction – had a question afterwards, then there were more questions after the experiments (see diagram below). All this will be addressed in blogs here, along with other discussions.

The image writing prompt was the same for each experiment and for all respondents for uniformity (there is a blog on the man and dog here).

Prompt image man and dog
Prompt image man and dog
Flowchart of Study

Geoff Davis

The computer support tool (CST) from this study is Story Live writing with AI free online

My other creativity tools are Notes Story Board and Story Lite from my Story Software. For my other activities please see the home page of this site.

Study

This study was devised and the site programmed by Geoff Davis for post-graduate research at University of London Creative Computing Institute UAL CCI 2020. The Supervisor is Professor Mick Grierson, Research Leader, UAL Creative Computing Institute.

Text Synth

Text Synth, by Fabrice Bellard, is a publicly available text generator, was used as this is the sort of system people might use outside of the study. It was also not practical to recreate (program, train, fine-tune, host) a large scale text generation system for this usability pre-study. Permission was granted to use Text Synth in the study by Fabrice Bellard Jul 7 2020.

Fabrice Bellard, coder of Text Synth.
Fabrice is an all-round genius and writes a lot of OS. Text Synth was built using the GPT-2 language model released by Google OpenAI. It is a neural network of 1.5 billion parameters based on the Transformer architecture.