Announcing Plottr’s AI Future!

Hopefully that title made you excited and hopefully you didn’t read it with a groan. 😁

I’m super excited to start talking publicly about Plottr’s AI future and the features that we’re building for you.

Is Plottr Becoming an AI Company?

We are not becoming an “AI Company” nor is our focus changing to mainly “AI” features.

And don’t get me started about how LLMs are not true AI. You can read my take on that on my Substack here, but instead of saying “AI” in quotation marks every time, I’ll just be cool like everyone else and call it AI.

But just know that what we have now is not true AI. That’s just hype.

But either way, Plottr is not becoming an AI company. We’re not riding that trend, nor are we getting millions in funding for AI that will change the world.

Our small team has changed a small corner of the world more than once and we’re excited to just stay laser-focused on things that will keep serving writers.

But the world does seem to be at a crossroads and every team making software has to evaluate how “AI” could make their software even better. (Oops, I did the “AI” thing again. Bad habits die hard I guess)

Since Plottr is uniquely situated at the beginning of your story’s genesis, we are smack dab in the middle of this world-altering crossroads. Just like I write in my Substack, we need to embrace AI tools but also make sure our work has more humanity than ever in it.

How we Plan to Make AI in Plottr Useful

Plottr is often the first point of creativity for your story (not the prose, but the story) and because of that, we have a unique opportunity to use AI in a way that helps you brainstorm and create. It’s kind of a perfect match.

But we are NOT becoming an AI company.

Today I’m announcing what our projected first couple of AI features are going to be, and over the course of the next few weeks I’ll be going into more detail about how you’ll use AI in Plottr and — most importantly — why we’ve made the decisions we have.

Developing AI for Plottr: The Story so Far

We’ve been working on this for months, maybe even close to a year. I hesitate to say that because that might increase expectations for what the AI features are capable of. These features haven’t been our sole focus, and we’ve been taking the slow, thoughtful approach.

Instead of focusing on throwing everything AI into Plottr, as a team we’ve been more focused on making the whole process of using AI in Plottr enjoyable and useful.

We’ve thought long and hard about what capabilities we could give you with AI technology, but we also thought long and hard about what NOT to add.

We want to make an almost magical experience, not a dozen features that are pretty meh.

What AI features are Coming to Plottr?

The few capabilities that we’ve included in this first set of features are more about experimenting —and getting the experience right — than giving you everything that AI could do.

Hopefully you’ll see the care we have taken to make it delightful and easy … and give us a little grace when it comes to raw AI power.

So without gilding the lily or delaying any longer, here’s the first set of AI features in Plottr:

• • Generate random Character ideas

• • Generate random Scene ideas

• • Generate random Place ideas

• • Generate random ideas about your story

• • Fill out a whole Character sheet with random ideas

• • Summarize your book

Most of these are intended as a means to brainstorm ideas for small pieces of your story.

Like I said before, these may not be the most impressive things AI can do for your writing, but combined with the right software magic that’s already there, we think these features are going to help you become even more productive and have even more fun creating stories with Plottr.

I can’t wait to tell you more about these features, how you’ll use them, and why it’s going to be a great experience, but that’s all for now!

Cameron Sutter,
Plottr Founder and CEO

About Cameron
Cameron Sutter is a sci-fi/fantasy author and the inventor of Plottr – the popular visual story planning software. He’s escaped death by explosion, rock slide, disease, and car accident. He loves doing funny accents for his kids, but believes his life’s mission is to serve writers. He lives near Oklahoma City with his wife, six kids, and too many pets.