New AI Wants to Help Write Stories That Run for Hundreds of Episodes

Keeping track of everything that happened in a long-running series can be difficult even for its biggest fans. Now Pocket FM has launched an AI system designed to do exactly that while helping writers create new episodes.

Called Sherpa, the new platform is designed for serialised fiction that can continue for hundreds of episodes, rather than simply generating a short story from a prompt. 

So what does Sherpa actually do?

The easiest way to understand Sherpa is to imagine an AI writing assistant with a very long memory.

It can help develop ideas, research subjects, plan future episodes and write scenes. More unusually, it keeps track of the fictional world as the story grows.

That means remembering who characters are, what they know, their relationships and unresolved storylines. Something that happened 50 or 100 episodes earlier can still influence what happens next. 

Writers remain in control of the story and can accept, change or reject what the AI suggests. Pocket FM says Sherpa is intended to support creators rather than replace them.

One writer using the system described it as having an assistant who knows their story almost as well as they do, helping spot forgotten characters, plot holes and inconsistencies. 

Could AI keep a huge fictional world straight?

That’s what makes Sherpa different from another AI tool that can simply produce paragraphs of text.

Pocket FM specialises in long-running audio dramas and says its library now includes more than 770,000 series, with over 550,000 creators using its platform. 

For anyone familiar with soaps and other long-running dramas, the challenge will sound familiar. Characters can have years of relationships, secrets and history behind them, and one forgotten detail can create a continuity problem much later.

Sherpa’s experiment is whether AI can help creators remember all of that while humans decide where the story actually goes.