NovelAI is an AI-powered story generator.
But does it actually work? How creative is the AI behind it?
Let’s find out.
Getting Started with Novel AI
Getting started with NovelAI is super easy because you don’t need to sign up to start using the tool!
To start writing with NovelAI, head over to the novelai.net homepage and click “Start writing for free”.
Once you’ve done that, a writing view opens up:
There are three options to choose from.
- Storyteller
- Text adventure
- Image generation
If you want to create a unique and compelling story, start by choosing the Storyteller mode.
By the way, I’m going to show you the results of each of these writing modes in just a bit. But to truly know whether the tool is for you, you need to try it yourself in your particular use case.
Key Features
- Storyteller mode. The main story generator feature of NovelAI is the Storyteller mode. In this mode, you give the AI some basic input and it starts writing the story for you piece by piece with a click of a button. This mode generates unique and creative content. Besides, it offers you full control over the content (easy edits, re-creates, and more).
- Text Adventure mode. The text adventure mode is a text game that requires some imagination from you. You decide what the game setting and character are. The AI will take care of the actions based on your input.
- Image generation mode. Of course, an AI story generator tool needs an image generator for showing fantasy-style images in your stories, novels, or such. The image generator asks for simple text input from your imagination and it spits out a unique and original image.
- Free trial. NovelAI has an extensive free trial of 50 generations. Although you can’t use the free trial on image generations, you can use it in generating stories and playing the text adventure.
- Custom editor. You can customize the NovelAI editor to meet your eye. You can tweak fonts, colors, and layouts. This is a convenient feature for someone who’s going to spend a lot of time in the editor.
- Story encryption. NovelAI protects your work. All the AI-generated content belongs to you and lives on an encrypted server so that no one can steal your work.
- Knows many writing styles and authors. NovelAI language model knows how to write in different techniques and styles, such as Stephen King or William Shakespeare.
- Easy to use. Last but not least, the tool is easy to use. As a user, all you need to do is give it some input and the AI generates you creative and compelling output.
My Experience with Novel AI
I ran extensive tests on NovelAI so you don’t need to bother. I tried both text-generation modes as well as image-generating tools.
Novel AI Story Generation
Let’s focus on the story-generating capabilities first. More specifically, there are two modes in NovelAI:
- Storyteller for creating stories from scratch.
- Text Adventure for playing an AI-powered text game.
Let’s start with the Storyteller.
1. Storyteller Mode
Let’s start with the Storyteller mode.
Basically, the Storyteller mode opens up a blank text editor where you can type some input.
For example, here I’m typing something to start the story:
Once I click “Send” on the bottom right corner, the AI completes the sentence I was writing in a creative way. I clicked to send a couple of times and here’s the result:
And by the way, if you’re not happy with the sentence NovelAI generated, you can press the retry button. For example, I’d like the story to continue a bit differently here:
After pressing “Retry” the AI replaces the last sentence with a new one that’s completely different than the original one:
So far I must say I’m impressed thus far!
I’m a full-time blogger and I’ve found out that state-of-the-art AI tools aren’t really that great at coming up with unique, original, and factually correct blog posts. But in story and novel generation when the facts don’t matter, I think AI is awesome.
2. Text Adventure Mode
Another way to interact with NovelAI is to generate a classic text adventure. In this mode, you play a text adventure game where you first generate the scene and characters. Then you tell the character instructions and the AI uses its creativity to play the game for you.
For example, here’s a text adventure where I’m a rabbit called Alice that’s running across the field in the middle of the night:
The lines that start with “>” are the lines where I give instructions to the game character. And the ones without the “>” symbol are the actions that AI generates in the game based on my input.
Once again, this was quite an experience for me! I didn’t realize AI could generate good stories like this. But this is not that big of a surprise given the capabilities of today’s AI and the fact that creating a game like this is abstract. There’s not really right or wrong here.
The best part is that this mode is also free (although there’s a limited number of credits). So you can try this amazing text adventure game yourself!
Next, let’s try the AI image generation capabilities of NovelAI.
Novel AI Image Generator
NovelAI also supports AI art generation. All you need to do is come up with input from the deepest corners of your imagination and let the AI take care of the rest. Also, NovelAI allows you to tweak the image-generating parameters for further customization.
Notice that the image generator is not a free feature. You need a paid plan to access the image-generating capabilities of NovelAI.
For example, here I’m using NovelAI to generate a unique image of “A mystic wonderland in a distant galaxy in the middle of a thunderstorm surrounded by high mountains“:
And here’s the output:
If this is the first time you’ve heard of or seen AI-generated art, you may wonder if this piece is a copycat.
But the truth is this is an AI-generated original and unique image.
All this is possible thanks to the big leaps in AI developments during the years 2020-2022. Before those times, no one could ever imagine AI would be capable of producing such images.
Nonetheless, as a story creator, you might find these images useful if you want to add them to your stories.
After experimenting with NovelAI’s storyteller, text adventure, and image generation modes, it’s clear to me that this tool offers a successful way to use AI in generating stories and images.
The fact that I don’t need to care about facts when generating stories makes it so much easier.
It doesn’t really matter what the AI says as long as it’s grammatically correct and compelling. As I already mentioned, generating blog posts with AI is much trickier because it quite often messes up information. But in the story generation space, this is not an issue.
Pricing
NovelAI has a free trial. After using the free trial, you can choose between three paid plans:
- Tablet: $10/month
- Scroll: $15/month
- Opus: $25/month
What I Like about Novel AI
- Free trial. NovelAI has a fantastic free trial that lets you try the storytelling and text adventure features.
- Creative. NovelAI’s underlying AI algorithms are cleverly crafted to produce unique, original, and creative stories very fast. All you need to do is give it some direction.
- Different modes. NovelAI is not just an AI story generator. It has a text adventure mode as well as an image generation mode.
- Easy to use. The tool is easy to use and to get started with. You don’t even need to sign up to start using the tool.
What I Dislike about Novel AI
- Limited free trial. The free trial has its limitations. Although the story-generating features are accessible for free (even without sign-up) the image-generating capabilities are behind a paywall.
- Clunky UI. I tried generating an image with the free version. The tool asked me to sign up but I couldn’t find the signup button anywhere. Also, the tool doesn’t offer that good hints as to how to use its features. It assumes you’re a story writer or have played a text adventure before.
- No “full story” option. Whether this is a good thing or bad thing is up for debate, but NovelAI generates stories piece by piece. It doesn’t have an option where it would generate a story from start to finish in one go.
- No money-back guarantee. Most AI writers I’ve tried have a money-back guarantee that I really like! But NovelAI doesn’t have this feature. So you literally have to pay $10 minimum to generate one image, for example.
Final Verdict
I think NovelAI is the best creative AI I’ve used. It definitely suits authors who are looking to create compelling stories, novels, and other creative content where facts don’t matter.
The storyteller mode is easy to use. The tool takes your input and you can generate an entire story by clicking the “Send button”. Besides you can fix sentences you don’t like with “Redo”.
The text adventure offers a text-based game operated by creative AI. You choose a character and tell it what to do and the AI comes up with the actions that take place after
Last but not least, the image generation mode lets you create unique, original, and great-looking fantasy images. But this is a paid feature!
All in all, I’d definitely give NovelAI a try. Its free trial lets you generate 50 pieces of story so you can play around with it quite nicely.
Thanks for reading. I wish you happy and creative writing!