Scrivener could add inline A.I. tools like Novel Crafter and have people bring their own API keys.
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I think A.I. tools would be very helpful for overcoming writerâs block and making corrections. Good tools do not supercede the writer but provide aid.
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Reminds me of that day when the garage refused to fix my car because of mechanicâs block.
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Even worse when they put your car up on blocks.
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Hereâs the spell-checked and slightly edited version of your text:
I find this to be a little short-sighted. AI integration and having AI write content for you are two separate things. AI integration is about automating non-creative tasks, converting, brainstorming, discussing things with a buddy, and having language discussions, all in the context of what youâre working on right now. It involves giving descriptions of what you want and having it generate world-building items, summarizing your content in the notes, helping you maintain your worldâs integrity, and warning you when you violate an established timeline. Itâs about pulling reviews and editing earlier in the workflow.
There is no legal swamp here because weâre still not generating content with AI. Youâre just leveraging AI within the context of your work. Itâs a snugger version of copying and pasting your stuff to an external AI chat all the time. I think software like LivingWriter proves its merits.
Regarding third-party services being unreliable, thatâs nothing new. All software deals with this, and itâs on the developers to ensure the software is robust enough to handle this and to provide clarity about availability. Thatâs about expectation management and being able to deal with network errors.
Really, the (premature) almost hostile stance against AI integration is a bit disheartening to see. Going forward, AI is going to play a much bigger role, and itâs here to stay. Over the past few years, more and more competitors have emerged and are becoming serious contenders compared to Scrivener. While Scrivener has strong features and community benefits, itâs lagging way behind in the cloud space (still no web client or Android app). If the power of AI-supported authoring continues to be ignored, Scrivener is set to become a boomerâs go-to tool and, like Japanâs pension system, will collapse due to a lack of younger users, even if its core features are stronger than its competitorsâ.
Letâs stay progressive and adventurous, like your users.
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Hereâs the original version of your text, written and proofread by a human:
While Scrivener has strong features and community benefits, itâs lagging way behind in the cloud space (still no web client or Android app).
A subjective point of view. Spreading yourself as thin as a pat of butter over an entire loaf of bread is another kind of lagging behind. Either you spend your days supporting every other operating system you get asked about, and âweb appâ, and never really reach a level of sophistication as a result, or you do what you do best on the systems you actually enjoy using. So this is a form of taking whatever is important to us and looking for developers that donât do it, and calling them âlagging behindâ for that reason: i.e. subjective.
As for the rest, I havenât played with âAIâ too much, mainly because whenever I see someone posting their ChatGPT tips every other sentence is incorrect and the whole thing sounds like a bland PR consultant, leveraging and synergistically empowering users, left and right. If it gets that much wrong about the stuff I know, then why would I trust it to be a âwriting buddyâ? And if I canât take it seriously because it sounds like corporate satire, why would I want it clogging up every single program I use and wasting developersâ time (like web apps waste their time, subjectively). Generated text looks about as appealing to me as generated art: it doesnât.
Let the tech mature, or die off (hopefully), then maybe it will be worth consideration. But until then it is at best mildly amusing (like when Google suggested that adding 100ml of Elmerâs Glue to the pizza sauce will help the cheese from sliding off), but more realistically itâs kind of awful, and is already turning the Web into even more of a muddled layer of mediocre âcontentâ than it was when the SEO experts got well into destroying it.
Is that a hostile take? I donât think so, but some people do equate candid reactions with hostility, so maybe from some points of view, sure.
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Iâm sorry to say, but that does come across as rather hostile. Your negative opinion is based on anecdotal evidence, which is not a very strong position. Itâs pretty clear you havenât spent much time with AI, which is a pity, because you might actually discover how natural it is to converse with one and how much knowledge there is to be had (forget about the buzzwords). More importantly than just knowledge, itâs a marvelous brainstorming tool: forget about the data or info it givesâwhich may have been hallucinated to a certain extent, although less and less with each iterationâand again, forget about the buzzwords. Just try once and give it your idea or thought on something and ask it for alternatives or something like that. Just like a sparring partner, it bounces around ideas. You might find it stimulates your creative energy and boosts your motivation to write. Iâve even used it to analyze other novels, which gave me great insights as to how stories can be structured for example, or suggest plotting work flows. If you are even a little bit curious, give it a try at https://chat.openai.com/chat. Even if just to get a better grip on why you donât like it, because not only is âwhenever I see someone postingâ not very useful in debate, itâs unfair to yourself. You can do better!
AI may not be for you if youâre set on ignoring it until you canât anymore (it wonât die off, that much is clear). However, you should realize you are not the only type of user of tools like Scrivener. There are swaths of new users that will grow up with AI-infused software or are used to it already, and Scrivener needs to think of them too, or it will indeed fade away together with the people screaming at the clouds, rather than embracing it.
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There are now plenty of ways now to use AI products and put the results into the authorâs Scrivener manuscript. Scrivener is a tool for enhancing human intelligence.
Iâm not keen to encourage Scrivener to do a lot of âintegrationâ as I can see how it will dilute their development efforts, could possibly explode support issues, and perhaps introduce legal burden on copyright and all that (currently not yet tested in courts, AFAIK).
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Scrivener is for writers. There are plenty of other options available for Letsomethingelseforthemwriters.
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Agreed, but I fear youâre not seeing the bigger picture. Iâve been following this trend since the start, both as a user and as a developer, and I can confidently say, for a variety of reasons, that this type of AI is going to be ubiquitous, not least because itâs becoming very cheap to use and integrate as a service. It will be everywhere, and usersâespecially the future user baseâwill be expecting it.
I get your point about development being spread out; at the same time, other developers somehow manage. Also, Scrivenerâs feature set appears to have remained largely consistent over the past few years. Broadly speaking, it has the same feature set as it did five years ago. It has matured, and I think it is ready for new adventures.
Regarding legal burden and copyright, again, AI integration doesnât have to be about generating your content. In fact, I advocate against it. The whole point is to look at it as a tool to help you write more and better.
Personally, Iâm sad about the mindset towards AI that I find here because Iâm familiar with the synergistically empowering aspect of AI (sorry, Amber), and I miss it. I would have gone to another writing platform, but when I look at all the other competitors, I ultimately seem to be drawn back to Scrivener due to its compatibility with my specific workflow (Iâm rather demanding in top-view drill-down navigation and quick in-place editing). Every other online tool seems to be great at a few things but often missing one thing I have on my list of requirements (like switching to the scene edit mode directly from its linked outline or note).
Iâve now examined Campfire Writing, Dabble Writer, Fictionary, LivingWriter, Novel Factory, NovelPad, Novlr, Plottr, Squibler, and WorldAnvil. Dabble and LivingWriter come very close to my needs, but Scrivener has it allâexcept AI integration and easy access from my Android devices. Now, I can get an iPad for the first, and I can even work with the latter, but it involves completely breaking immersion, having to copy-paste snippets all the time for analysis, discussion, editing, and switching programs. But it goes beyond that: take LivingWriter, for example. The AI integration is such that you can âtalkâ or query your whole manuscript: âHow many times did I mention Jake?â, âIs the timeline realistic?â, âIâm struggling with where to go with chapter 6; can you suggest a few possible routes?â, âIs my tone of voice consistent?â, âDid I resolve my log line?â. Thatâs just very neat, especially for complex novels, and from a technical point of view not even that difficult (and thereâs a huge community around doing these kind of things). Of course, you can do without all that; writers have for ages. The same can be said for people traveling from A to B using horses until Ford had some bright ideas about that.
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Feels like mind reading ⊠I try to avoid that.
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Horses are still a thing, though. People enjoy riding them, despite having access to (cheaper, faster, more convenient, etc.) cars. Not once have I met an equestrian wishing for horses to be more like cars.
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I did not go into detail on the matter because it felt irrelevant, and left it to trust that I wasnât just outputting language without having any knowledge of what Iâm speaking of (ahem).
By saying I havenât played with it too much, that shouldnât be confused with my never having once tried it! Rather, I have in fact spent hours looking into it, mainly from the standpoint of what is capable on consumer-grade hardware (because putting privacy invading portals that pipe every userâs WIP into corporate AI servers in your software is a massive no-no). Thus, no interleaved multiple Nvidia H100 Tensor Core GPUs running through a PyTorch CUDA setup capable of loading a 140B parameter LLaMA 2 model (previous gen, but v3 is limited to 70B last I checked) with GPTQ 32g 4bit quantisation and SuperHOT/RoPE fine-tuning to allow for 32k token contexts, and a Scrivener-specific LoRa trained against it. Whew.
Such would limit our potential user base to those that can afford $32,000 USD per GPU and have an office that looks like a server room. More modestly, an 8â13B model, which can fit into the modern array of Mac low to mid-range hardware, with its universal memory setup, and using the GGUF k-Quant (Q4, which is the threshold in my opinion, where below that perplexity noise is too high) builds to allow for a reasonable token count on the context prompt, whilst still having enough left over for inference that isnât in the sub-0.1 token/s output range. Of note, I had to boot my MacMini 8GB headless, and log in with a remote shell to avoid the full GUI layer from booting up, otherwise the LLM and so much as a Finder window would be too much for it. So I was basically using the Mac as a server for another machineâan abstract test purely for the sake of seeing what the absolute best for that economy-range hardware looks like.
The result? Crap. This is with something hogging almost the entire MacMini, so much so you canât even log in without dropping the inference rate to 20 to 30 minutes for 200 tokens or so. With a slightly smaller model I could get a decent output rate while logging in and using it as a computer as well, but it really needs to be emphasised how wooden and âconfusedâ a <7B model can be. There are some really cute tiny models, such as the LLaMA 1.1B, but it honestly doesnât come off much different than Ask Jeeves in 2004. How it gets there is more interesting than the actual result though, because pushing that level of optimisation is how this stuff is going to be feasible.
So, I guess not using any jargon at all to discuss this is maybe a constraint I donât understand, because we might as well talk about it completely and with technical awareness of the limitations and where they arise from, in available hardware and current modelling science. When I say itâs not ready yet, the above is the framework within which I say it. Because again, us delegating your private work to Meta or Google or OpenAI is unethical from our perspective and thus out of the question.
Until local models can provide a reasonable level of simulated discourse, itâs a toy. The only other alternative is us hosting something ourselves, and that isnât something we have the time or expertise to do (never mind how expensive it would be for this to delegate to thousands of instances). I mean, I could probably set up some iron that does it, I have after all, toyed with a short-term big rig rental just to see what a big model can do in comparison to the small stuffâbut just fooling around with tests is far away from saying, âtrust us to keep your data private and for this thing to always work and not be sillyâ.
But enough exposition. Letâs see how the well-regarded (within its constraints) Mistral 7B v0.3 model works!
USER: Hello, could you check the following text for hostile tone, and let me know what can be improved?
<Above response snipped from input>
LLM: The provided text seems to contain specialized terminology related to artificial intelligence, computing, and technology. While this may not necessarily convey a hostile tone, it could potentially be overwhelming or confusing for readers who are less familiar with these topics. To make it more accessible to a wider audience, consider simplifying some terms, providing explanations when necessary, or using analogies to help illustrate complex concepts. Additionally, breaking longer paragraphs into shorter, easier-to-digest sections can also improve readability.
Commentary: the language generation did not adequately compensate for the notion of it being a targeted response to the original quotation, which implored me to try using an LLM just once. The response was written to demonstrate how I have gone quite a bit further into that, and certainly further than logging into some service. So the advice to remove that intentional level of detail is in contradiction with the intent of the piece, and furthermore is irrelevant to the original query of checking for a hostile tone. The advice it does give is bordering on common senseâI shouldnât need 95% of my Macâs resources to come up with that.
Meanwhile, the average paragraph length does not strike me as being problematic. That it produced that critique could be why blog and news articles these days tend to consist of Twitter-length optimised single-sentence âparagraphsâ, but this is speculation on my part.
Continuing on, using all of the previous tokens to simulate a conversationâŠ
USER: I am less interested in whether there is technical jargon, as the discussion is about this technology. Simplifying that for a broader audience is not necessary. Please refer to the original question on whether the tone of the writing is hostile.
LLM: Upon reevaluation based on your request, the text does not appear to have a hostile tone. However, it could still benefit from being made more approachable to a wider audience by explaining certain technical terms or providing examples. Breaking up long sentences into shorter, more digestible parts can also enhance readability.
Commentary: it is still hung up on making the text more pleasing to a broader audience, despite my having specifically requested its generation be tuned to avoid that parameter. At this point, it has also shifted to sentence length instead of paragraph length. Iâll admit, I can write some breathless sentences.
USER: All right, please rewrite the sample text with an even less hostile tone, even though you did not detect one, but keep the technical jargon and do not mess with the overall paragraph and sentence structuring.
LLM: Hereâs a revised version of the text, keeping the technical details while making it friendlier and more accessible:
Commentary: so, this is you it is quoting, lets be clear. 
Not only did it rephrase my words and put them in your mouth, it doesnât even get the facts straight to point of committing word salad at some points. At least it got the quotation syntax right.
But hey, now it is apologetic, chipper, positive, and affirmative⊠and bland! Note, I specifically did not prompt for it to be more accessible, but at least the âeven less hostileâ equating to âfriendlierâ part worked. To speak of the result, I would personally feel put off by a response like this from someone though, as it comes off patronising to me, so whether it is truly friendly is a matter of taste I suspect.
There is nothing useful in that for me to work with, so Iâll stick with the original human generated variant.
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Thatâs because you were not there when the revolution happened 
However, like you, the people at first were not so receptive of cars either. Cars became ubiquitous of course and every horse and wagon company would go bankrupt if they didnât adapt. Except for, as you say, vendors for the rare horse aficionado or more commonly, the quaint romantic experience of being driven around in a horse carriage. Sports remains ever popular, though.
@bbottema @November_Sierra Could it be that one of you is older than 40 and the other younger? 
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I guess you felt the need to demonstrate your extensive knowledge on the topic as if it would invalidate my points somehow. Your detailed response didnât go unnoticed; however, it didnât address any of them. What was the point, really? Was it merely about keeping your data local, which canât be done with current models? If so, how is that related to Scrivener offering such capability?
Users of tools like Scrivener can decide for themselves if they want to use AI for their benefit. All software developers face this issue; itâs nothing new or unique. Do you think all companies are keen to share their data from Word or OneNote with Microsoft? Of course not, but itâs still available for the rest of its user base. What about mind mapping software like TheBrain? All opt-in, of course, as it should be. I fail to see how this relates to your venture into trying to reword your hubristic comment on language models and GPUs and failing because you use local hardware. Whew.
Iâm right on the edge 
I guess you felt the need to demonstrate your extensive knowledge on the topic as if it would invalidate my points somehow.
Yes, the somewhat tongue in cheek response was specifically to address this point:
Itâs pretty clear you havenât spent much time with AI, which is a pity, because you might actually discover how natural it is to converse with one and how much knowledge there is to be hadâŠ
To clarify the exercise: we would not be comfortable with sending user data (even if there is informed consent) to a third-party, given the choices available for doing soâother people doing that doesnât change this. Other people send your usage patterns in the software to third-party analytics services. That doesnât, in and of itself, mean itâs fine so long as you have an opt-out checkbox buried in settings somewhere. Thus if you are of that inclination, this leads to the examination of privacy-friendly local models, which are as demonstrated, not very insightful or useful, yet.
They almost certainly will be at some point, and then weâd be comfortable looking at it in theory. Questions still arise as to whether this is largely a marketing gimmick or something that really needs to be inside the software itself, though. By that I mean, telling people to Alt+Tab is a perfectly viable approach to using a computer, but telling people you donât have to Alt+Tab could be seen as a gimmick.
As an aside: as a developer you might be interested to note that Scrivenerâs compiler is programmable for plain-text output, which youâd want here, via its Processing compile format pane. It would be trivial to create a compile Format that generates a prompt and interfaces with an API, and in turn updates something Scrivener monitors on the disk, like the Scratch Pad folder, as an output.
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Iâm not sure âusing more power than entire countriesâ is part of my definition of âcheap.â
The independent AI vendors are not profitable at this time. The in-house projects at places like Google and Microsoft are not releasing profitability metrics. It is not at all clear how âcheapâ these tools will be once the actual cost is being supported by the user (or by ads targeting the user). There are certainly abundant examples â especially online â of services that attempted (successfully or not) to monetize themselves only after attracting significantt numbers of users.
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@bbottema Mr. ⊠would not have been offended by the way you called him. Of course I donât know him, but I know him well enough from this forum to know that heâs pretty smart and relaxed.
I fear a generational conflict is raging here. Or letâs say you realize that not everyone is the same. And that also has to do with age. People like me say âpleaseâ when they ask the AI something. And then âthank youâ when they have received the answer. Completely absurd, I know. But I wouldnât feel comfortable doing it any other way. So bear with me if I donât feel like having a âsparring partnerâ whose name I can barely pronounce. 
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