I’m back in the saddle tonight. Great announcement about my AI editing tool below.
For reading, I made progress on The Rithmatist by Brandon Sanderson. Great book and a great magic system.
For marketing, I’m working on a project that I can’t share just yet, but it’s going to do a really nice job of getting my work out there to a group of underserved readers. It will take me a few more days but I’m about halfway done.
I also spent quite a bit of time doing follow-ups from Superstars. I enjoyed that. It’s all done now.
For production, I wrote about 5,000 words today, so killer word count day.
Anyway, some important news about my AI editing tool. While I was away, my developer sent me the first draft of the program we sketched out. And it worked. Beautifully.
Here’s how it works.
It uses GPT-3 to edit text for typos ONLY. GPT-3 is a very capable proofreader, and it catches loads of things that Grammarly and ProWritingAid do not. It specializes in more advanced, sophisticated language things, like missing articles, homonyms, and more. I continue to be amazed at the types of errors it catches, especially dictation-related ones.
How I use it: I open the app, upload a Microsoft Word document and click Run. The program then sends the document through the GPT-3 API and then returns a NEW version with edits made. For Windows, the app will then create a comparison document so you can see the edits as tracked changes so you can accept/reject everything. For Mac, it can’t do that, so you just have to open Word and use the Compare feature. Just a few extra clicks, but you can get the same result.
I’m amazed at how well it works and how cheap it is. The 5,000 words I dictated today cost me $0.14 to run them through the API. It’s next to nothing.
The best news is that the app is quite easy to install. There are only 4 steps:
#1: Install Python (not hard).
#2: Get a free OpenAI account and generate an API key (not hard)
#3: Install the program (called Grammar Assistant) (not hard)
#4: Open it and run the app.
I am fairly certain I could record a 5-7 minute YouTube video walking people through it. You just have to know where to point and click. Essentially, if you can follow instructions on a YouTube video, you can install this.
We’re just working through a few kinks with the Windows version as well as some last minute additions (like a progress bar), but for Mac, it works really nicely.
Compared to what I had going with Google Docs, this is night and day different. Much, much better.
Anyhoo, assuming no major snags, once this is a little further down the road, I’ll open it up to brave volunteers with a technical nature who would be willing to test this to make sure we aren’t missing anything. Then, I’ll release it open source. You just have to bring your own API and pay the costs to run it.
It’s totally possible that Microsoft will make this program irrelevant depending on what they do with ChatGPT and Word, but I personally don’t want to wait on them, especially when the API is out there ready for the taking. Plus, Microsoft may well not implement editing into its initial use cases, since everyone is crazy about generative AI right now. No one’s really talking about editing. I may wait until Microsoft makes their move because that will always be a better option for most.
There you go. Success! It feels great, and it’s going to make a huge difference in my writing. Hopefully it can for others as well.
Have a good night.
