Ghostwriter

Hack@Brown 2023 Project by Colden Bobowick, Luke Briody, Lexi Henrion, and Maya Magavi

Inspiration

Our project is based off of our favorite part of campfires: ghost stories! The inspiration for Ghostwriter comes from the love of storytelling and the desire to bring a unique experience to the audience. Ghost stories around a campfire have always been a popular tradition and with Ghostwriter, we aim to bring a new twist to the age-old classic. With the use of GPT-3 and DALL-E, our project creates a personalized and customizable ghost story that offers endless possibilities and scenarios. Whether you’re a fan of spooky tales or just looking for a fun and interactive experience, Ghostwriter is the perfect choice!

What it does

Upon loading Ghostwriter, users are prompted with information about character names, the location of their ghost story, and the specific genre they are looking for. If the user dares to enter the story, they are brought through a transformative experience in which they choose their adventure from a series of options.

How we built it

Ghostwriter is built entirely in TypeScript React. It utilizes calls to the OpenAI models GPT-3 and DALL-E to write the story and provide relevant images, respectively.

Challenges we ran into

One issue we ran into was a "User-Agent" header that was blocking the DALL-E calls on the client-side requests. After (countless) hours of debugging, we found that the issue was in our promise chaining when instantiating our Typewriter text effect.

Another challenge we encountered was effective use of OpenAI credits. Since we didn't have time for mocking and testing, every Ghostwriter run uses some of our free OpenAI credits. In development, we used around $20 in free credits.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The UX took the majority of the time and is much more advanced than anything we have made previously. We believe that a smooth UX is essential to the core purpose of Ghostwriter, so we are proud of how this aspect of the project came out!

What we learned

We learned a lot of React, since the entire project was built in React. We significantly improved our abilities to make API calls, chain promises, and develop a smooth UI.

What's next for Ghostwriter

Ghostwriter needs two things: loading optimization and monetization! At the moment, Ghostwriter is not fiscally sustainable as each story costs around $0.50! Additionally, loading times are relatively long, so Ghostwriter could benefit from a nice loading screen and some image optimization! Finally, the API prompts can always be fine-tuned to improve story flow!

Built With

• dall-e
• gpt-3
• openai
• react
• typescript
• typewriter-effect