This Startup Wants to Automate Fiction

But the AI that is supposed to excel at writing is too expensive for OpenAi to operate

Author

Mignon Fogarty
April 21, 2025

Issue #54: Back to News

On today’s quest:

— Bloomberg profiles an AI “romance factory”
— ChatGPT 4.5 is too expensive for OpenAI
— “Explicitly” may be the new “delve”
— Can a creative agency survive AI?
— What AI can and can’t do for dictionaries

It’s happening: AI fiction companies

We all knew it was going to happen: some startup decides it can use AI to churn out novels. Bloomberg calls Inkitt a “romance factory,” and the article was the most fascinating thing I read about AI all week.

It has technology — the company is using the kind of A/B testing websites use for headlines to tweak the plot of romance novels. If they detect readers losing interest at a certain page, they make changes on the fly, sometimes hundreds of times.

It has drama — real authors, at least one of whom initially made millions, have soured on the company.

It has hubris — the smooth talking founder envisions a deluge of books (and more) driven by human “authors” who supply just a few bullet point ideas. — Bloomberg (archived version)

The ‘good at writing’ ChatGPT is expensive to run

ChatGPT 4.5 is the model that was supposed to be especially good at writing, but it turns out it’s so expensive to run that OpenAI is taking the option away from developers who use the tool through the API, who are being told to use the newer 4.1 model instead. It will still be available through the paid ChatGPT portal used by consumers, but the number of queries is limited (at least at the $20-per-month level).*

(Also, 4.1 is newer than 4.5? What’s wrong with these people?) — TechCrunch

‘Explicitly’’ may be the new ‘delve’

As a heavy em dash user, I’m annoyed by the continuous clickbait on social media about em dashes being a sign of AI writing — which has made me less interested in any story about “AI tells” — but I feel obligated to pass along that Ethan Mollick suggests “explicitly” is the new “delve” of AI-writing tells.

Will AI take your editing job? What can AI do for dictionaries?

For the Grammar Girl podcast, I’m currently running some of the bonus episodes that Grammarpalooza subscribers previously got, and I’m realizing that I shift a whole lot of discussion about AI to those bonus episodes.

First: Samantha Enslen and I talked about how she expects AI to affect jobs at her writing, editing, and design agency, Dragonfly Editorial.

Second: Erin McKean and I talked about what she has seen that AI can and can’t do for dictionaries.

Listen to the podcast on Apple Podcasts or Spotify while you commute, work out, or cook dinner, or if you must, watch the YouTube videos**:

Quick Hits

How to write good prompts. This is a highly technical document meant for developers. The examples of prompts you may find interesting start on page 14. — Google

Sam Altman says ChatGPT use has doubled in the last few weeks driven by its new image-generation capabilities and people’s love of Hayao Miyazaki knockoffs.*** Growth was apparently particularly strong in India. — Fortune

A research group has published a disturbing prediction of how AI will change the world in just a couple of years, which some people in the industry view with skepticism. (h/t Jaclyn Arndt) — AI 2027 (The Hard Fork podcast had a great interview with one of the authors too. It starts at about the 25-minute mark.)

What is AI Sidequest?

Using AI isn’t my main job, and it probably isn’t yours either. I’m Mignon Fogarty, and Grammar Girl is my main gig, but I haven’t seen a technology this transformative since the development of the internet, and I want to learn about it. I bet you do too.

So here we are! Sidequesting together.

If you like the newsletter, please share it with a friend.

Written by a human (although I did ask ChatGPT for subject line suggestions and used a modified version of one of the options).

* I haven’t had a chance to test 4.5’s writing yet, and now I’m not sure I even will. It would still be interesting, but “expensive” means “uses a lot of energy,” and that concerns me. This also highlights how complicated the energy/climate situation is for AI. There’s not one “AI” with one cost. Each model is different. I have read many, many articles and papers, but I still don’t feel like I know what the truth is.

** I greatly prefer to listen, but I know some people prefer video, and Beehiiv makes it much easier to embed video than audio.

*** I find this sad since Miyazaki has referred to AI as “an insult to life itself.”