NaNoGenMo Updates

I’m now halfway through NaNoGenMo 2024. I’ve been working on my project every day this month and wanted to share some initial thoughts.

• Having a software project to tinker with is fun, particularly with NaNoGenMo’s time limit to keep me focussed.
• My tinkering has been distracted by working on refactorings rather than the GenAI-specific code. Adding design patterns into the codebase has been a useful opportunity to think about refactoring, and something I should be playing with coding projects more often.
• Working with the LLM fills me with awe. These things can produce coherent text far faster than I can read them.
• The output is readable without much work. I asked ChatGPT4 to produce a Fitzgerald pastiche (Gatsby vs Kong – about kaiju threatening a golden age) and it’s an interesting text to scan through.
• The question of testing is particularly tricky here. I’m producing novels which would take about 3-4 hours to read. I’ve been randomly sampling passages, picking out style issues, but structural ones/weird repetitions on a larger scale will be harder to fix.
• My overall plan is to produce a novel made of oral histories. Getting these to sound varied in tone is a challenge, and one I will dig into over the last two weeks. My pre-NaNoGenMo experiments suggested that LLMs were good at first person accounts – but getting an enjoyable novel out of them is difficult.
• I’m relying on the structured JSON outputs from ChatGPT to get consistent formatting from ChatGPT, as it gives me a little more control.

Technically, I’ve completed NaNoGenMo as my project has used a fairly basic technique to generate 50,000 words of Godzilla vs Kong. But, ultimately, the question is whether ChatGPT can produce an enjoyable novel. I thought previous entrant All the Minutes was a genuinely exciting piece of literature. That is the bar I want to aim at.