[vidarh]

It seems to do ok at coming up with starting points or give you options if you're stuck. But the quality of the prose it comes up with is indeed awful. It gets a bit better if you ask it to write in the style of a specific author, but marginally so.

I guess maybe it gets to mediocre fan fiction level.

That's still pretty impressive, but not very usable for creative writing yet.

[sharemywin]

Don't most create writers have a process?

I wonder if there's a series of steps(prompts) that could be used to get it to out put something much better. I know I've used it to write something I would have never even attempted let alone tried to write on my own. It came out ok, but better than I could have done on my own.

[vidarh]

Some do. Others will just sit down and write. But the problem isn't so much that it can't handle plot. That is amenable to process - there are huge numbers of different processes, and one that might work well for GPT is something called the Snowflake method, which is basically iterative refinement. E.g. start with a one line description, expand it to a paragraph, expand each paragraph to a paragraph, then to a page or a few, and eventually to a list of scenes, and write out the scenes. Oversimplified (there's some steps with character sheets etc. too).

For that it might well be useful, because you could do one iteration at a time, edit the output to keep/reject ideas and do the next step.

But the challenge is that while it might not be "easy", it's the less time consuming part of a novel (certainly has been for me). The time consuming part is writing out the scenes, and the part GPT so far is awful at is the prose. So even if you manage to get it to produce a coherent script setting out what should happen, you still (so far) will have to expect to rewrite the entire thing anyway. That may or may not be useful to you. For my part I suspect I'd write faster from scratch than trying to edit and keep it consistent.

That said, given how far it's gotten I wouldn't at all be surprised if it can get to reasonable prose in another couple of versions.