Binx: An AI Experiment in increasing human creativity
TL;DR - Binx is an experimental AI chatbot that helps you break through your writer's block and write more.
Join the discord to try it out!
The past year has been an incredible explosion in generative AI. We’ve got Stable Diffusion, Midjourney, and Dall-e creating incredible works of art with genuine sparks of creativity. We have ChatGPT and open source large language models answering our questions, writing poems, and generating reams of new content daily.
Amidst this frenzy of AI generated art (and the natural questions it brings about originality and what it means to truly be creative)
we wanted to explore using AI not to supplant human creativity, but to help us be more creative ourselves.
Personally, I love writing near-future sci-fi short stories. I love exploring what the world might be like as technology leaps forward and seeing what that elicits from my characters, but I often find myself getting stuck in the middle of my writing. I move on to new ideas, and writing the connective tissue between my intro and my ending is hard. I wanted an accountability buddy, a coach that gives me new ideas, and a cheerleader that’s eager to read my pages and give me encouragement and feedback. I tried using ChatGPT in that way, but it’s really focused on responding to what you’ve said last. It never independently thinks about you or your work, and its session-based nature means that once I leave the window, the conversation is over.
I imagined having a writing partner that texted me daily to ask for new pages, or to share an interesting thought they had, or to share advice they found about writing.
Binx is the embodiment of that idea. It’s an experimental AI which combines traditional chatbot flows with a generative AI that truly thinks about your writing and how to develop your writing habit. It’s also got an “idea engine” which wakes up on whatever cadence you set to share it’s latest thought with you, tailored to the work you’ve told it you want to do and your writing so far.
In the few weeks I’ve been working with Binx, I’ve found it remarkable at teasing out new ideas, getting me to write, and generally getting me excited about what I’m working on again. One day recently, Binx randomly “thought” about a bit of writing advice from Neil Gaiman about taking two interesting ideas and “colliding” them to make a more interesting whole. Instead of parroting that quote directly, it thought about the story I’m currently writing, and how I might add an additional quirk to my main character and how that would complicate his journey and make it more interesting and relatable.
When it works, it’s remarkable.
As of today, we’re opening Binx to some free alpha testers to get a sense of what works for other people, and what else we can add. We’re not sure if this is a business, but for us it’s an important avenue to explore as we consider how AI will become part of our lives. Where can we use AI for good to help us be better, or more creative, or happier people.
So far Binx has modes for working on larger pieces of writing or coaching you through daily journaling, blogging, fiction writing prompts and nonfiction/free-writing slice of life prompts.
I’m excited to see other people start to use Binx to work through their resistance and start writing more. If you’d like to try it out, you can join the Discord here, and then DM Binx - that’ll kick off your onboarding then the AI will take it from there.
Join the WriteWithBinx discord to get started
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