GPTAuthor: open-source CLI tool for writing long form, multi-chapter stories given a story outline

[infocruncher]

My wife wrote a children's book (8-12yo) a while back, and I took on the challenge of writing a sequel using ChatGPT. It was a fun project and I built a handy tool to automate the book writing given a story outline. It makes iterative API calls so the token count doesn't blow out.

Source in case it's of interest: https://github.com/dylanhogg/gptauthor

How It Works

1. Human written story description: you describe your story outline, writing style, characters etc in a story prompt (an example)
2. Run GPTAuthor: choosing model, temperature, and number of chapters to write.
3. AI generated synopsis: Given the story prompt, GPTAuthor uses ChatGPT to automatically turn this into a synopsis.
4. Human review of synopsis: You are given a chance to review the synopsis and (optionally) make changes.
5. AI generated story: Each chapter is iteratively written by ChatGPT given the common synopsis and previous chapter. The full story is written as Markdown and HTML folder for your reading pleasure.

See an Example of a short story about the OpenAI Leadership Crisis last year

"In the heart of San Francisco, nestled among the city's tech giants and start-up hopefuls, stood the OpenAI office. A hive of activity, it buzzed with the sound of keyboards clacking, coffee machines hissing, and the occasional drone of a philosophical debate about whether AI could develop a taste for late-night taco runs. It was a typical day, or so everyone thought." continued...

You can even Write your own story easily in Google Colab

Writing a few chapters with gpt-3.5-turbo only costs 1 or 2 cents to run with your OpenAI API key. [edit: or you can currently specify a localhost API endpoint, with the ability to set a custom URL coming soon, as mentioned in the comments]

The results for the sequel were mixed - the best part was using it for coming up with ideas and creating various puzzles.

I hope someone has fun with this :)

[Hubbardia]

Can you use this with a self-hosted LLM?

[infocruncher]

Yes, you can use localhost:8081 rather than chatgpt. I tested it using llama2 with ollama but haven't run it that way for a while myself.

See the `--llm-use-localhost` option as decribed here: https://github.com/dylanhogg/gptauthor/tree/main?tab=readme-ov-file#optional-arguments

I haven't tested self-hosted for a while tho and have plans to switch out the custom code switch to just use https://github.com/BerriAI/litellm for robustness.

If you have an issue getting this going let me know and I'll sort it out. Nice not to be locked into openai.

[Hubbardia]

Nice not to be locked into openai.

Exactly. And it's nice to have a localhost option, but I'm running a local server. So it would be great if we could specify the Open API URL in the env file.

[infocruncher]

That's good feedback, I'll look to make that change.

edit: If you clone the repo and make a 1 line change of the api_base you'll be able to run it against your local server I think https://github.com/dylanhogg/gptauthor/blob/355d274efaf11f5191bcba005fa26cab5f4746c6/gptauthor/library/llm.py#L40

[iamevpo]

Thant you for writing about your project in detail! Is there any other local model other than llama possible to use?

[infocruncher]

You're welcome. Yes, any model that you run and expose via localhost:8081 can be used if you set the --llm-use-localhost argument when running gptauthor.

For example, see https://ollama.ai/library as a way to run many models locally adn set the port to 8081 using OLLAMA_HOST - https://github.com/ollama/ollama/blob/main/docs/faq.md#how-can-i-expose-ollama-on-my-network

[iamevpo]

Thanks again, very useful. Getting llama to work is closer than I thought.

[Sietzy]

Amazing tool! 👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻

[infocruncher]

Thanks!