ChatGPT or other LLM integration

Scrivener
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This is my wishlist for that next iteration of Scrivener that’s not out yet. Whatever it is that comes out, it needs to work with AI seamlessly. That probably means markdown, something similar, some other approach, or it must be built-in.

First, Scrivener is undoubtedly the best story writing software to have ever been created – I’ve tried a few others and they don’t come close. It’s really good at what it does. It’s been the only software I’ve used to create stories after purchasing it, and I’ve loved every minute of it.

Then things changed, and AI became a real thing. The beginning of this year was the turning point, and since then, things have evolved even more quickly. It’s no longer “AI is coming” or “AI is failing”, it already happened. My own experience is that across multiple industries, AI use is now a core part of the job description. In some cases, if it’s not used, it becomes a problem related to efficiency and production. Having used AI myself quite a bit, I can attest to its benefits. Naturally, some people will use it responsibly, others won’t.

I use AI for planning, and keeping track of, well, everything: character bio’s, plot, timeline, chapters, acts, etc… It will never write a single line of the story I’m working on, but it will analyze, and validate, what I have and provide valuable feedback. For $200 a year, I have access to a very capable assistant, one that still makes mistakes. This assistant can keep up with the rate of ideas that I feed it, and help organize and update everything.

Up until this point I haven’t really used AI in this capacity, but now I have. In the past, I tried to be a plotter, and failed every time. The reasons being exactly what AI has done for me above. When I need to make changes to the plan, AI speeds that entire process considerably, and makes things so much easier. Now I focus almost entirely on ideas, and less on book-keeping. I’m no longer trying to use a workflow that works better for someone else, it’s all my workflow.

The consequence of this, and I hate to say it, is that I’ve had to stop using Scrivener. Now mostly working with markdown files, and I dislike markdown; however, integrating with AI far outweighs my preference against it. In two days of non-stop work I’ve completely planned, outlined, created character sheets, created a timeline, etc, and am now ready to start writing. If I attempted to do the exact same thing, all by hand, I wouldn’t even be half-way done.

My workflow now is:

  1. plan story in markdown files
  2. write story in Ulysses

Ulysses. Why use the editor that I don’t really like using? Well, it’s starting to grow on me out of necessity. I created an AI skill that will parse through their XML files so the AI can read them as plain text and provide important feedback. That same information is then cross-referenced with my outline, and everything else I’ve done. This is extremely powerful.

What did I lose moving to this workflow? Obviously Scrivener, but I feel like its time to move on to a different approach. While RTF is a good choice, it makes my workflow harder to deal with. I could copy/paste everything, or, I could save myself the step, focus on what’s important, and have AI work natively with what I have. This also saves money when it comes to token usage. I also lost the ability to work wth ProWritingAid, but their Anywhere app is a complete struggle to work with, and I’m not going to trap myself into requiring an online connection to do anything.

EDIT:

just realized that there is a textutil on mac to convert rtf to text files. I don’t think I need Ulysses, and won’t use it, if this works out. Still, it would be much better if it were easier to have AI to modify files directly in the project. Right now, no matter what the workflow, for me, AI never directly touches my story, but if it could, that would mean everything could be in one place.

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Nope. It doesn’t.

Scrivener integrates whatever the OS is offering is this regard (if it does). Unless L&L’s stance has changed, that’s the extent of acceptable integration Scrivener will ever see. Thankfully.

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FWIW, a significant number of users have the exact opposite opinion about AI.

So do a lot of editors. If it were me, I would want to be very sure of my intended market’s AI policy before I let a chatbot anywhere near my WIP.

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The Sync with External Folder mechanism is the supported way to give third party tools access to the project.

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As @kewms mentions the official method that works well for many people, there is also an unofficial and unsupported path that a coding model could probably orchestrate:

@cavalierex has done most of the hard work to parse the project XML and supports conversion of the custom RTF that Scrivener generates (styles are not part of RTF “spec” so KB uses custom markup in RTF). Gets you clean structured markdown, and what goes one way could go back the other. Understanding the XML hierarchy from the Binder + conversion of Scrivener’s styled RTF (solved by squarto) would enable a agent skill to pull structured text out, and inject changes back… BUT this is wholly unsupported and one would certainly want project backup before any sane person would let an agent anywhere near their work…

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I think the return trip (back into RTF) would be very tricky because of the Scrivener Styles. That semantic meaning would get lost along the way.

I do think it makes sense for future version Scrivener 4 to allow for a Markdown/plain-text back-end rather than RTF. It would open up so many doors, as you and I have previously discussed, plus the current added bonus of Markdown/plaintext being the lingua Franca for machine learning models. But this would be a major change in Scrivener’s implementation that I don’t think will happen.

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The original post asks us to accept “the dramatic importance of LLMs for writers today” - I’m still deciding whether or not the pun was intended, although I’m leaning towards ‘pretty unlikely’.

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I’m leaning towards the expectation that much writing will be done with and perhaps exclusively by AI engines. At the expense of real writers? Maybe. Maybe not. The arms race is on.

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Certainly at the expense of real newcomers (especially self-publishing ones). Now dead writers, even unknown ones, have an ironic advantage over living ones: Being able to instantly prove their work was written by a living being. They just can’t celebrate it.

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On the other hand, writers whose work is out of copyright have no defense against AI imitators “in the style of.” :nauseated_face:

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First of all, you can avoid a fair bit of smoke by defining terms:

“AI” is a boogeyman in creative circles, especial those that expect they will watch as others make more money than they do on their work already.
“Analytical AI” is probably what you mean here and it is probably more acceptable to the younger writers out there.

This is the use I think you want to use “AI” for.

“Generative AI” is something that every paid and dreaming-of-being-paid writer will feel VERY STRONGLY about. Those that do not have any idea about how hard it is to sit down and craft a story from ‘thin air’ like the idea of being able to pay a trifle of money and get a full novel out in a few hours. Sadly there is a growing number of corporate types that have absolutely fallen in love with the idea that they can pay a tool to do EXACTLY WHAT THEIR EGO WANTS and not have to keep artists and copywriters on staff. Whoops, when did that soapbox appear under me…

I think you may have missed an important distinction here. Scrivener is first-and-foremost story ORGANIZING software. So is Ulysses come to that. Yes, you can compose in it directly — I’ve done so, more than a million words at this point — but its strength is that it leverages the digital power of the computer to collate, index, organize, and all of the bits and pieces that collect along with the words that will one day be the final manuscript sent to the figurative printers.

When Scrivener came alone there were several types of writing software that did similar things but none of them were all that good at keeping the research separate from the story.

If I am understanding your usage, you have turned to “AI” to replace these functions in Scrivener. I’m sympathetic to the desire of wanting a synthetic agent to help me figure out things like when I’ve spun up three or four rather two-dimensional supporting characters named similarly that all could get combined into a single more robust character and perform just as well…. Or similar analytical things that a computer might spot better than my Mk I mod 0 eyeballs. Thing is, this is just the sort of thing that a good trusted Alpha Reader can do for you to, and if that Alpha Reader is also a writer, they can often give advice on how they would work around what they find. Writing in absence of similar minds is a handicap that “Analytical AI” does not yet abate.

There is better ‘composition’ software out there. Many people swear by Microslop Office (I just swear at it). Others like Ulysses or Obsidian. I came to Scrivener having used yWriter prior to that and Storylines/WritersCafe prior to that. Around 2002 the big thing was screenwriting software that gave you a bunch of blanks to fill in about characters, locations, and things and in effect used those details with internal templates to generate ‘story’ for you. Those platforms were panned then just as “Generative AI” is now.

I love Scrivener. I love using it. I do wish it had a few features I remember (probably incorrectly) from software I’ve used before[1]. But “AI integration” isn’t one of the features I miss.

Sidebar: When someone comes up with a LLM that can run locally on an air-gapped computer and be fed a writer’s manuscript and answer the author’s questions about what they have fed it, then shut it down assured in the knowledge that no one else gets to use that insight, more people will be comfortable using “AI” in writing.

  1. like an Add Character/Location/Thing context menu dropdown, Character/Location/Thing highlighting, auto tag generation for known Character/Location/Thing names, or the big one Character/Location/Thing indexing rather than passive reference sheets in the Research folder. ↩︎

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Yeah, this is where the upside of being dead really shines.

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I think you’re being too kind.

These are generative tasks. “Planning” and “keeping track of” are not the same thing. For fictional characters, every aspect of their bio, their timeline, etc. is a product of the author’s creative imagination. To say that AI “will never write a single line” while assigning such fundamental tasks to it is to misunderstand what “writing” even is.

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Guilty as charged. I do think there may be a use for these sorts of ‘agents’ but not until after everyone figures out where the limits are.

Now if we are allowed to have tools like that, I cannot say. If the current trend in telematics being sold to unnamed third parties as a condition of first party sales is any indication, then we likely won’t be allowed to use tools that we control completely.

Starting to ponder trying to code a C64 version of Scrivener, I wonder what sorts of licensing terms I’d be offered…..

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If there ever comes a tighter integration of Scrivener with AI, I hope it’s to navigate/automate its incredibly complex settings and compile feature set.

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Yup, the thrill of an idea popping into your head from a throwaway comment a friend has made, planning the story, making notes by hand so you really get to know the characters and locations, writing it, then polishing it. …

There is no feeling like the one you get after you’ve spent a day wrestling with a single paragraph, then sitting back at midnight thinking, “Yes … that’s what I wanted to say.”

It’s probably just me, but why would I want to have someone else do the hard part? The point of doing any of this is to do the hard part. :man_shrugging:t5:

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A while ago I was advocating that if AI were to be added in to Scrivener, that it would be up to the user if they signed-into an AI service. If they don’t sign-in, AI is just part of the feature set that isn’t used. I still don’t understand the arguments from those who don’t want it incorporated, albeit as an optional setting.

However, I would much rather L&L gets the new app out of the door. That now is much more important to me as a Scrivener successor.

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Even if only one user ever uses the feature, we still have to support it.

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And that support would likely be around AI-using writer’s pleas for making connections to this or that 3rd party “cloud” or “desktop” software.

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You can slowly grow into using the “incredibly complex settings.” No need to master all of them at first. Start out with the basics of using the Editor and the Binder, and the basics of the Inspector. I’m still learning things I didn’t know before, and I’ve had Scrivener for 6 years and have written two books with it (with many in varying stages of incompletion.)

As regard to the Compiler, the key to learning that is long before you need it. I’m starting a concerted effort to finally master it by creating two test projects, one using the General Non-Fiction template and the other using Novel With Parts. I filled them up with pages and pages of loren ipsum, divided everything into chapters, added prologues and appendices and all sorts of things designed to push the compiler and my sanity to the limit and will run test compile after test compile until I finally get the output to be what I want it to be, then save the thing as a custom template for my non-fiction and fiction.

(I’m tired of trying to relearn what I had forgotten since my last successful compiling attempt.)

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