AI for online novelists

Cool - NotebookLM is the kind of thing, if I understand it, I can upload a book and it will “understand” it as well as it gets my concatenation of character bios.

t tested it with Shakespeare and it seems to have read all the plays and didn’t fall for my trick questions about Prospero’s Books.

“This book taught me that if your friends are a bunch of lazy, illiterate pirates, you can talk them into doing all your digging for you.”

Bart Simpson’s report on treasure Island

Is it any good? Absolutely! It’s a bit old-fashioned in the way it’s written, but it’s packed with excitement, suspense, and some really interesting characters. Long John Silver is one of the best villains ever – you’ll love to hate him! And Jim is a really relatable hero; you’ll be rooting for him every step of the way.

Treasure Island isn’t just a swashbuckling adventure, though. It also deals with some pretty cool themes, like good vs. evil, growing up, and figuring out who you really are.

So yeah, dive in! You’re in for a wild ride! Let me know what you think when you’re done - I’d love to hear your thoughts on Silver, the island itself, and whether Jim makes the right choices! Happy reading!

Excerpt from Gemini on the same

NotebookLM is fascinating.

All I did was submit the 21 chapter summaries, basically about 10 bullet points per chapter. Google chugged away at it or a few minutes and generated a 20 minute podcast between a man and a woman who traded cohesive and accurate insights (my wife was listening) and their banter was the most realistic i’ve ever heard from a computer. I then asked for a video - having not fed any character images and it did a reasonably good 6 minute PowerPoint type presentation. 39Mb and 16Mb respective. It was like I was listening to NPR.

There’s no API - not even in the paid version - yet I’m not sure it’s a good idea to allow users to pose potentially difficult questions: “What is the answer to life, the universe and everything?” and have it create a 42 Tb answer.

I haven’t yet collected the entirety of the book from my wife, yet I was thinking of generating:

Yet truly amazed at this tech.

Sage advice. I’ve turned off that toggle except for my local testing. Oddly, when of, you can still ask it who indiana jones is and sometimes it will cut things short and say he’s not a character in the book, others try and do a compare/contrast with the book’s protagonist.

Yet I cannot see a way to prevent the query from hitting Gemini or Mistral. I guess I will try and keep the open text query’s open yet throttle them per IP. Same with the “canned’ queries which it allows the user to save and adds to the list. I reckon that ability will be exploited by 13 year olds and probably have to be turned off. There is a login required message board adjunct to the site where privileges like that can be relaxed. Perhaps. At least when there are active moderators.

Yeah, it’s really good and getting better all the time. Yet Google never even bothers to market it, focusing on all their other worthless Gemini spam instead. Shrug.

It’s still not super clear to me what you’re experimenting with or trying to do. Make a human-AI hybrid interactive novel, where your wife lays out the major plot points and the AI fills in the gaps?

Do you remember a few years ago, when GPT2 was still a thing, that mobile game AI dungeon? https://play.google.com/store/search?q=ai+dungeon&c=apps

Are you making something similar? That one runs on an entirely local model, of which there are many more these days, and they’re a little better. Nowhere as good as the cloud models, though, but probably good enough for an interactive novel? You have more control over the system prompt and fine-tuning and such that way, vs being limited to the cloud APIs.

As I earlier said, the book was completed without the use of AI.

I have a page with about eight “common” or suggested questions, yet also an open text box where users can query, starting off (now) with about seven elements - the chapter synopsis, character synopsis, theme elements etc… concatenated with one final directive, basically their age or maturity level they want and the tone of the answer, which I take on the end.

So even if that stuff does or doesn’t get in the way, or they can add to their query to dismiss the prompt entirely, i’ve throttled a given IP to 10 queries per hour and I’ll see how that goes.

Like the gemini snippet above about Treasure Island, questions for that might be about Jim’s choice, is he evil, is this all a dream. The adjunct message board - a separate login site (no charge) covers some of that and perhaps the AI stuff can be moved there - yet for now it’s in the open internet.

ETA: Yet someone could ask if some character had used his magic in a different way, how would that have turned out. If the AI even partly uses the prompt (esp. if the whole book is at hand) it might get back some other outcome, yet nothing in the AI is going in the book.

Actually, since I cannot query NotebookLM via an API, I will likely just use it to generate these podcasts that sound so authentic (due credit given) and working off less than 200 lines of chapter summary and not the book or the other things.

Right now, it’s just summary elements that the AI uses, and I’m more interested in using different LLM’s than just Gemini and Mistral (which responds more like Ben Stein or a bank teller).

Like I said, if this minimal knowledge “podcast” was played on NPR, they made the plot and the characters sound interesting. From an amateur novelist born in St. Petersburg (though she taught English at the University) and has some interest in Medieval China and Wuxia which I understand to incorporate magic elements to this fiction.