Comment by creesch
5 days ago
> I was thinking of writing a new story, and found http://sudowrite.com/ via an ad, an ai assistant for helping you write, its already used by a ton of journalists and serious writers, and am trying it out.
I am not seeing anything indicating it is actually used by a ton of journalists and serious writers. I highly doubt it is, the FAQ is also paper thin in as far as substance goes. I highly doubt they are training/hosting their own models yet I see only vague third party references in their privacy policy. Their pricing is less than transparent given that they don't really explain how their "credits" translate to actual usage. They blatantly advertise this to be for students, which is problematic in itself.
This ignores all the other issues around so heavily depending on LLMs for your writing. This is an interesting quirk for starters: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/apr/16/techscape... . But there are many more issues about relying so heavily on LLM tools for writing.
So this example, to me, is actually exemplifying the issue of overselling capabilities while handwaving away any potential issues that is so prevalent in the AI space.
Hey co-founder of Sudowrite here. We indeed have thousands of writers paying for and using the platform. However, we aim to serve professional novelists, not journalists or students. We have some of both using it, but it's heavily designed and priced for novelists making a living off their work.
We released our own fiction-specific model earlier this year - you can read more it at https://www.sudowrite.com/muse
A much-improved version 1.5 came out today -- it's preferred 2-to-1 vs Claude in blind tests with our users.
You're right on the faq -- alas, we've been very product-focused and haven't done the best job keeping the marketing site up to date. What questions do you wish we'd answer there?
> We indeed have thousands of writers paying for and using the platform. However, we aim to serve professional novelists, not journalists or students. We have some of both using it
Your marketing material quotes a lot of journalists, giving the impression they too use it a lot. I have my reservations about LLMs being used for professional writing, but for the moment I'll assume that Muse handles a lot of those concerns perfectly. I'll try to focus on the more immediate and actual concerns.
Your pricing specifically has a "Hobby & Student" section which mentions "Perfect for people who write for fun or for school". This is problematic to me, I'll get to why later when I answer you question about things missing from the FAQ.
> What questions do you wish we'd answer there?
Well it would be nice if you didn't hand wave away some actual potential issues. The FAQ also reads more like loose marketing copy than a policy document.
- What languages does Sudowrite work in?
Very vague answer here. Just be honest and say it highly depends on the amount of source material and that for many languages the result likely will be not that good.
- Is this magic?
Cute, but doesn't belong in a FAQ
- Can Sudowrite plagiarize?
You are doing various things here that are disingenuous.
You basically talk around the issue by saying "well, next word prediction isn't exactly plagiarism". To me it strongly suggests the models used have been trained on material that you can plagiarize. Which in itself is already an issue.
Then there is the blame shifting to the user saying that it is up to the user to plagiarize or not. Which is not honest, the user has no insights in the training material.
"As long as your own writing is original, you'll get more original writing out of Sudowrite." This is a probabilistic statement, not a guarantee. It also, again is blame shifting.
- Is this cheating?
Way too generic. Which also brings me to you guys actively marketing to students. Which I feel is close to moral bankruptcy. Again, you sort of talk around the issue are basically saying "it isn't cheating as long as you don't use it to cheat". Which is technically true, but come on guys...
In many contexts (academia, specific writing competitions, journalism), using something like sudowrite to generate or significantly augment text would be considered cheating or against guidelines, regardless of intent. In fact, in many school and academic settings using tools like these is detrimental to what they are trying to achieve by having the students write their own text from scratch without aid.
- What public language models does Sudowrite use and how were they trained?
Very vague, it also made me go back to the privacy policy you guys have in place. Given you clearly use multiple providers. I then noticed it was last updated in 2020? I highly doubt you guys have been around for that long, making me think it was copy pasted from elsewhere. This shows as it says "Policy was created with WebsitePolicies." which just makes this generic boilerplate. This honestly makes me wonder how much of it is abided by.
It being so generic also means the privacy policy does not clearly mention these providers while effectively all data from users likely goes to them.
*This is just about current questions in the FAQ*. The FAQ is oddly lacking in regards to muse, some of it is on the muse page itself. But that there I am running in similar issues
- Ethically trained on fiction Muse is exclusively trained on a curated dataset with 100% informed consent from the authors.
Bold and big claim. I applaud it if true, but there is no way to verify other than trusting your word.
There is a lot more I could expand on. But to be frank, that is not my job. You are far from the only AI related service operating in this problematic way. It might even run deeper in general startup culture. But honestly, even if your service is awesome and ethically entirely sound I don't feel taken seriously by the publicly information you provide. It is almost if you are afraid to be real with customers, to me you are overselling and overhyping. Again, you are far from the only company doing so, you just happened to be brought up by the other user.
Wow, so many assumptions here that don't make sense to me, but I realize we all have different perspectives on this stuff. Thank you for sharing yours! I really do appreciate it.
I won't go line-by-line here defending the cutesy copy and all that since it's not my job to argue with people on the internet either… but on a few key points that interested me:
- language support: I don't believe we're being disingenuous. Sudowrite works well in many languages. We have authors teaching classes on using Sudowrite in multiple languages. In fact, there's one on German tomorrow and one on French next week: https://lu.ma/sudowrite Our community runs classes nearly every day.
- student usage - We do sometimes offer a student discount when people write in to ask for it, and we've had multiple collage and high school classes use sudowrite in writing classes. We'll often give free accounts to the class when professors reach out. I don't believe AI use in education is unethical. I think AI as copilot is the future of most creative work, and it will seem silly for teachers not to incorporate these tools in the future. Many already are! All that said, we do not market to students as you claim. Not because we think it's immoral -- we do not -- but because we think they have better options. ChatGPT is free, students are cheap. We make a professional tool for professional authors and it is not free nor cheap. It would not make sense for our business to market to students.
- press quotes -- Yes, we quote journalists because they're the ones who've written articles about us. You can google "New Yorker sudowrite" etc and see the articles. Some of those journalists also write fiction -- that one who wrote the New Yorker feature had a book he co-wrote with AI reviewed in The New York Times.
> I then noticed it was last updated in 2020? I highly doubt you guys have been around for that long
So many of these objections feel bizarre to me because they're trivial to fact-check. Here's a New York Times article that mentions us, written in 2020. We were one of the first companies to use LLMs in this wave and sought and gained access to GPT-3 prior to public API availability. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/24/science/artificial-intell...
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