And I really do mean "assist", most of the stuff I'm finding on google makes it look like people just type in "write me like a whole novel bro, uh, this time make it about wizard ponies" or something.
IDK just tell me whatever. Are you avoiding it? Is it useful? How so? What kind of prompts are you getting good results from? Are you just copying and pasting or do you use it some other way?
Not exactly what you're asking about, but I have an experiment going with chat gpt 4, got it to come up with a plan for writing the novel given that it can't fit the whole thing into its context window. It decided to start with an outline and then hash and rehash into chapters/sections at various levels of detail. It wanted to use a plain text document to keep track of the work and it tells me what to paste into there. I've put a couple of hours into it.. despite the 8k token context window, 12000 words give or take, the detailed outline, and several sections written, we still haven't exceeded its short term memory, it can recall text and facts from the very beginning of the conversation, but yeah eventually that will run out, I'm hoping it will eventually ask me to query the document for things it can't remember. As for the quality of the output, it's so far okay, much better than I could write but less good than the very best authors, I asked it to write in the style of Arkady Martin and N.K. Jemesin, with some hard sci Fi elements reminiscent of Greg Egan. It definitely understands the directive, but so far the quality is less than those first two authors, a high bar of course, I would classify the output so far as a bit tropey and derivative, but this is just the first pass, hoping to improve the quality as it refines the draft and criticizes itself, I would very much like access to the API in order to fully automate this process, it's essentially automatic already basically I just repeatedly tell it to continue the work.
If you wanted to use it for assistance, well I'd suggest just trying it, ask it how it can help, ask it to continually reflect and rewrite less than perfect outputs until they meet your standards. And def shell out the 20 bucks/ month for gpt 4, it's 10x smarter than the predecessor imo