I want to talk about a site I’ve been having a lot of fun with lately. This won’t be a formal discussion type of thing but more like me talking a bit about what it is and what I’ve done with it so far. The site I am talking about is https://novelai.net. NovelAI is a story generator that uses artificial intelligence to tell stories. There are two other main core sections which are a choose your own adventure kind of generator sort of like AIDungeon and also an image generator.
Over the past couple of weeks or so I’ve played with all three of these a good bit and I’ve really had a lot of fun. The story generator is pretty cool. You can type in something simple like “Dave met Sally in a cafe.” Then the story generator will come up with a few sentences based on that prompt. This leads to a kind of collaborative storytelling with you and the AI taking turns adding to the story. You can also set different genres or types of story and can even just set a genre and let the AI tell you a story by generating over and over.
One great thing about this story generator is you can plug in stories or parts of stories you have been working on and let the AI try to continue it. This can maybe give you a bit of inspiration to continue the story on your own. Also there are a ton of more advanced settings you can play with like setting certain keywords or tweaking the AI itself to change the results. Of course being an AI it can sometimes lose track of what the story is about or what just happened so it wouldn’t be reliable for just copying the AI output to a finished work, but a creative mind mixed with the AI could really put something cool together.
The next thing I want to talk about is the text adventure thing. This is a lot like AI Dungeon where you can give the AI an initial prompt and then let it give you a kind of choose your own adventure story. You can tell it what you want to say or do or even create a bit of the story yourself and then let the AI continue it. I don’t really have much to say about this one but it can be fun to play with.
My favorite part of the site is the last one. The image generator. This has to be one of the coolest things I’ve ever gotten to play with. By the way the images below are ones I’ve generated with the generator. The way it works is you enter tags like “cat_girl” or “brown_hair” or you can type in a phrase or sentence. Then the generator will pull from its vast database of images it sources from all over and then put together something from your prompt. Then you tweak the settings and rerun it a few times until you find something you are satisfied with. There are a ton of advanced settings you can play with here which can lead to all kinds of cool or weird results. I will warn you that being an AI it does have trouble sometimes with AI or with certain prompts. Sometimes asking it to generate two different characters at the same time will lead to weird results like it just putting one of the characters in the other’s clothes.
I will also warn you that unlike the other two features I talked about the image generator is not free. It requires a monthly subscription of at least 10 dollars a month. This subscription also enhances the capabilities of the story and text adventure features also. The image generator also uses its own currency called Anlas of which you receive a certain amount per month depending on your subscription tier. You can also buy more Anlas separately at a pretty good rate. The most expensive option is $10.99 for 10,000. You can generate images for about 6 to 10 Anlas a run so even pretty multiple iterations won’t set you back more than 20 or 30 at the most. The amount you get for subscribing can last quite a bit if you adjust your settings the right way, but if you intend to do a lot of generation prepare to shell out a little cash here and there.
I think that’s pretty much everything I wanted to say about NovelAI for now. It has a free version that will let you try out the story generator and the text dungeon if you’d like but as for me I’d recommend if you can afford it to try subscribing for a month to really get a chance to play with all the features. Oh wait one last thing I want to talk about is that NovelAI’s terms say they take no responsibility or ownership of anything you generate so you can freely use the things you generate as merchandise or character designs or even edit and sell them.
Well anyways those were my thoughts on NovelAi. It is a fun tool that I think has a lot of potential for the future of creative work. I know it has its problems but I’d like to do a bit more research before I talk about those and my thoughts on them in a future article. Thank you and I would love to see your generations or hear your thoughts about NovelAI or AI generation or the future of creative work in general. Thank you and see you later.
Play me a Future 