AI is Supercharging Writers with Sudowrite's Founder, James Yu

**Nathan Labenz** (0:00)
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**James Yu** (0:45)
Sudowrite is serving customers who are capital W writers. I think in this medium term, these LLMs do open up the possibility that, hey, if you never even consider writing a story or a novel, tools like Sudowrite can help you achieve that. We can let you give us both the 50,000 foot view all the way down to the leaves of the scenes themselves and who's in the scenes.
We're not out here to replace writers. We're out here to create tools in concert writers who are giving us feedback all the time about how this helps their lives and lets them be more creative. We worked hand in hand with novelists who were literally something like fried cheers of joy when they actually got this into their hands.

**Nathan Labenz** (1:28)
Hello and welcome to The Cognitive Revolution, where we interview visionary researchers, entrepreneurs, and builders working on the frontier of artificial intelligence. Each week, we'll explore their revolutionary ideas and together, we'll build a picture of how AI technology will transform work, life, and society in the coming years. I'm Nathan Labenz, joined by my co-host, Eric Thornburg. Hello and welcome back to The Cognitive Revolution. James Yu is a co-founder of Sudowrite, an AI writing assistant built for fiction writers. I first encountered James and Sudowrite on Twitter back in May, when he introduced a number of new product features with a video, and for some reason, presumably stemming from growing fears of AI replacement in general, and the ongoing Writers Guild strike in particular, ended up getting an absolute wave of hate and vitriol in response. The video, which has now reached more than 8 million people, has one of the crazier ratios you'll see. Especially if you take the time to watch the video and try the product as I did, and see just how thoughtfully James and team have built Sudowrite.
Fascinatingly to me, their homepage headline speaks not to AI capabilities, but to human needs. They describe the product as the non-judgmental, always available, willing to read 30 drafts, AI writing partner you always wanted.
It's clear from this conversation that James is someone who loves both AI and writing, and he's building something that helps him write better. So we focused mostly on how they've built the product over the last three years, starting with the original GPT-3, which they do still use in some cases. And then we also cover various language model tips and tricks that may generalize to other applications. My idea for an AI commercial bundle, his experience of anti-AI online dogpiling, and more.
As it happened, just as we were recording, news broke that a deal had been reached between the Writers Guild and the Hollywood Studios. And James has since publicly endorsed the AI portion of the agreement, which seems to protect writers' traditional contractual rights and prevents studios from forcing AI tools on them, while also preserving the writers' freedom to use AI as part of their creative process going forward.
I'm sure we'll talk a lot more about this precedent-setting agreement in the future, but for now, if you're enjoying the show, please do send it to a friend. We do a super wide range of episodes, and my hope is that each one can serve as a niche entry point into the broader AI discussion. But for that to happen, I do need some distribution help from the core listeners. So please send this one to a fiction writer in your life. And with that, I hope you enjoyed this conversation with James Yu of Sudowrite. James Yu, welcome to The Cognitive Revolution.

**James Yu** (4:13)
Thanks for having me.

**Nathan Labenz** (4:14)
I'm excited to have you. You have built a cool product and had a bit of a dramatic summer since you launched the most recent version of it, and excited to get into all of that. I should say right out of the gate, you are a founder of the company Sudowrite.