Current models can kind of do this, e.g. you could give some text to GPT-3 and ask it to do this. Not sure what the limit on the input length before results degraded would be. But yep, would be nice to see this out there in a nice interface and working well.
> Where is the support for finding other text you've previously written that might be appropriate?
Semantic search could be used for this, e.g. finding blocks of text similar to what you've already written
But yep, this stuff isn't all nicely packaged in one place
The editing process is a lot harder to build around than the more straightforward "continue this text for me". Partially because the models are really suited to do the latter out of the box, and partially because there's more nuance and subjectivity on the latter and it's harder to make it work well today.
That said, totally doable. (We put most of our effort into AI for human editing and control with Sudowrite.)
Can you elaborate on this particular point and how you would see it work in a collaborative doc/workspace?
Outlining is very underrated as a method of editing and organization, and most outliners are often designed for offline and personal use. I can see a lot of potential in adding automation to how you can organize and connect multiple nodes across outlines.
P.S. David Pierce wrote an in-depth review [1] with some interesting use cases. He was the one that originally broke Notion's story on WSJ a few years back.
Wasn't planning on making this public so soon (it's only been 2 weeks), but thought people here would be interested in checking it out. Got a lot of changes coming, so stay tuned! Happy to discuss at kevin[at]village.dev
That said, every implementation (including Notion's, which admittedly I haven't dug into very much) seems to be same stale "predict the next sentence" interaction, which reminds me very much of the early web's "it's like a store, but online!" vibe. In the sense of "I built this because it was straightforward to build" and not "I built this because I think it best meets what users need". To be fair, building the former can be a prerequisite to building the latter.
But honestly, most writing comes in editing; where is the help for editing? For rephrasing, or for making text flow more easily, or for reorganizing an outline and having the text update to reflect that higher-level reorganization? Where is the support for finding other text you've previously written that might be appropriate?
As someone who writes a lot (granted, in an academic setting), "first draft" is definitely part of the process, but it's just one piece! I suspect that in a few years today's tools will feel like ancient chisel-and-stone implements compared with what will come online. Can we get there already?