I’ve been toying with this idea for a while and made a few attempts following tutorials with some very basic coding skills, but honestly I find a lot of the resources and information quite overwhelming to take in sometimes so thought I would ask you guys with more experience here instead!
I have ADHD and often find myself juggling many creative tasks from writing music, writing fiction, graphic design, etc all the time. I find the “load” of all of these different spinning plates in my brain to be a lot to hold onto at times and have found the benefits in using ChatGPT for simplifying things or even just working through my own thought processes, and wanted to take this further.
To my knowledge, Chatgpt has a limited memory/recall ability, and after particularly lengthy conversations, it is unable to recall information from the beginning and starts guessing. Certainly with GPT 3.5 anyway. I also have never been too comfortable sharing much in terms of my creative projects with GPT for privacy reasons.
I have been trying to figure out if a localised model such as GPT4all or OLlama would be able to function better for my needs.
As an example, one of my largest projects is a fantasy fiction novel where I have spent so much time worldbuilding that my notes are quite extensive, and the connections between aspects can be difficult for me to keep track of and can sometimes result in me writing contradictions and having to spend time fixing my own errors. I do have StableDiffusion on my PC that I use to generate artwork to help me visualise people/the world (not intended for publication, obviously, I’d hire a real artist for that) and a fair bit of experience with it.
With GPT4all, or an equivalent, would it be possible for me to train a model on all of my notes and information, saved in a separate document, that I can discuss/collaborate with the model, keeping everything private, offline, and without having the model “forget” things?
Apologies if this is a really basic question that I have turned into a wall of text. But any insight you guys might have, or structured resources you can point me towards would be brilliant.
There are systems that take keywords and load related information into memory when they are fine in the context. This can help the AI know what it’s supposed to about things. I’ve not seen any that do this purely locally, but if you can code you could do the same. I wrote a vaguely similar system using an online AI and Discord with a SQL database so nothing useful to you but just to demonstrate it’s not rocket science.
That said, given what you say you need, there are several author tools that are made specifically for this purpose without any AI at all. It sounds like any of them might help.
Running locally depends on the quality and speed of AI you need. I can run SD locally, but I cannot run a local LLM that is worth anything to me, but if you’re wants are fairly modest and your GPU is mighty, you might have better luck.
Finally, I can suggest NovelAI, which is an online system, but it’s fast, high quality (nothing like ChatGPT 4), encrypted, and you can even optionally store everything locally (in browser cache, so be cautious I’ve seen people lose everything when trying to clear history or passwords). However everything gets sent to a remote server for processing so you do have to have an amount of trust to use it. But it has everything you say you’re looking for. It remembers facts through a lorebook that you can export for safe keeping. It’s geared specifically toward writing rather than being a digital assistant (it has that capability but ChatGPT is way ahead on that front).
Anyway no perfect solutions I know of, but hopefully I’ve given you some things to consider.
That said, given what you say you need, there are several author tools that are made specifically for this purpose without any AI at all. It sounds like any of them might help.
Not OP, but I’m interested in those. What tools do you know of?
I’m not an author, but I follow a few and have on occasion used writing tools to track TTRPG campaigns. My needs are best met by Joplin which is closer to a wiki than dedicated author tools.
Looking through my phone I don’t see any of these tools which must mean I haven’t tried any since I switched to iOS (the tools I used were cloud synced so I could access them while running games). So I can’t give specific recommendations, but I’d search for novel writing assistants, world building tools, things like that. Sorry I can’t offer more specific help, but they are designed to track setting elements along with the story itself.
