James Yu and Amit Gupta of Sudowrite were writers themselves when they started experimenting with GPT-3 in 2020. (They even named the company after the writing group they shared.) While many startups were assessing how generative AI could work in corporate contexts, Yu wondered if it could help writers like him get feedback when they need it—which can be hard to come by at 2:00 AM before a morning deadline, or after your accountability buddy has read your tenth draft.

Now, Sudowrite has about 15,000 paid users who use the tool to help brainstorm, draft, and revise their writing—mainly novels, Yu said. Like Inkitt, Sudowrite has found its user base to be most interested in genre fiction, but Yu says all types of styles (including literary fiction) are represented. Right now, the company uses a wide mix of models—over two dozen, including both foundational ones like the latest GPT and open-source models, which are less strict about the racy language their romance writers need.
The most requested feature, and what Yu and his team are trialing right now, is a model precisely tuned to a writer’s voice -— not Stephen King or John Grisham, but a customer’s own. Writers can add their own books in Sudowrite to tune the models for more aligned feedback.

Yu says they are very careful with this data. “We have never trained on any of our writers,” he says. “That work is sacrosanct to us, and if we were ever to do that, we would ask for explicit consent first.” But Sudowrite can only incorporate available models into their product, and the majority of those models are based on the original Internet-scraped data sets—although since GPT-4, OpenAI has been far less transparent about how its models are trained and tuned.