Novel AI Review – Is It the Best AI Storyteller in 2024?

Reading Time: 10 minutes

Novel AI is a powerful AI story-generator tool that helps to produce quality literature using artificial intelligence algorithms.

Its purpose is not to replace a human writer; rather it only assists in generating compelling stories through story ideation and plot generation.

The tool can also create AI-generated images that complement storytelling with illustrated characters using text-to-image AI art.

So, how powerful is the tool? Is it worth investing in it? Let’s find out through this detailed Novel AI review.

Novel AI Review: TL;DR

• The platform uses its own AI models trained using real literature.
• The tool adapts to user input and maintains user perspective and writing style.
• This AI tool uses machine learning and natural language processing (NLP) for character development and generating ideas for stories.
• This AI generates fantasy-style images for stories and novels using its image generation feature.
• It offers a free trial with limited features.

Who is Novel AI for?

Novel AI is for anyone who wants to engage in creative writing. Some use case scenarios include:

• Idea Generation: This tool can help a story writer to come up with new story ideas, characters, and plotlines from scratch.
• Writing Assistance: People facing writer’s block can use this AI storytelling tool to generate dialogues and narratives.
• Editing and Revisions: This AI writing assistant can help storytellers and fiction writers fine-tune their work by suggesting improvements to the storyline, characters, and pace.

In short, Novel AI is for anyone who needs an assistant for fiction writing to generate good stories using natural language processing.

Novel AI Review: Pros & Cons

Novel AI Pros

• The free version allows users to test AI story generation and play text adventure games.
• It can help users to write using the writing styles of famous authors like Edgar Allan Poe, Arthur Conan Doyle, Jules Verne, etc.
• Novel AI offers a customizable editor with tweakable layouts, fonts, and colors.
• This story-writing tool uses XSalsa20 Encryption on its servers and editor to prevent others from stealing your work.
• Powered by Stable Diffusion, the tool offers the feature of story-based image generation that you can include within the storyline.

Novel AI Cons

• The free tier is painfully limited.
• There is a steep learning curve. It can take days to master the tool. Unlike other AI tools, there aren’t enough hints to provide guidance.
• Sometimes, the generated ideas are robotic, irrelevant, and nonsensical.
• Their best AI storyteller (Krake) is reserved only for their most expensive plan.
• There is no money-back guarantee.

Novel AI Features

Unlike other AI writing tools that offer many features, Novel AI has only three core features! Two of them help you write stories, while the last one is for generating illustrations for your novels, stories, or comics.

1. Storyteller

The Storyteller is the core feature of Novel AI. This tool helps to generate ideas for your next compelling story.

The Storyteller tool is the text editor, where you will start by providing some input to start the writing process.

Once you write a few sentences and click the ‘Send’ button at the bottom, Novel AI will start writing based on your input. Once the AI stops writing, you can add additional input or click ‘Send’ again to make the AI continue writing.

If you dislike the outcome, click on the ‘Retry’ button at the bottom. The AI will replace the last sentence and continue the story differently.

While this all may sound pretty interesting, I found the outputs to be meaningless at times, especially while authoring a historical fiction.

The Storyteller tool completely failed to understand the context of the story, even though I added a lot of text to give the context.

Does that mean, Storyteller is not an effective tool?

I won’t entirely say that. Here are my observations:

• If you already have an idea, and you want the story to go in a particular direction, it will be difficult to steer Novel AI in that direction.
• Like most other AI story generators, Novel AI can help best by generating ideas on which you can expand. It is more effective if you are starting with a blank slate.

Don’t be surprised to see meaningless or incorrect sentences. That’s the nature of all AI story generators.

The whole idea is to help you find story ideas and assist you with the story-generation process, instead of writing the entire story without human intervention.

However…

You can play with the settings of Novel AI to determine how it behaves, the tone it uses, and more. You are free to select the genre (the genre list is far from complete).

While you can easily comprehend the basic settings, true horror comes when you venture into the Advanced Settings panel.

Almost everything you see there will seem alien unless you have some prior knowledge. But that’s not all. There are even more advanced settings which might give you nightmares.

But once you master the settings, Novel AI can do a much better job compared to its default settings.

Sadly, there’s no standard set of settings that you can use. It all depends on the type of output you need for a given context and story setting.

One feature that you might want to focus on is “Memory.” This is where you will give basic context to the AI to remember as it keeps generating the story with you.

Without Memory, Novel AI tends to forget the context as the story progresses. This is a neat and tricky method to keep the AI on track.

You can use the memory to define the main characters, the goal, the overall story setting, etc.

Surprisingly, the tool, with its default settings (even without Memory input), works great when you try to write in the erotica/adult/NSFW genres. It does pretty well with simple prompts.

I cannot show a sample for obvious reasons. You can try it yourself.

2. Text Adventure

The Novel AI tool can create a classic text adventure game. You can first start by generating characters and scenes and then you provide the character instructions. The AI tool will then use its creativity and play the game for you.

There are different modes like DO, SAY, and STORY that you can use to build a storyline and control the direction in which the game goes.

Text adventures do not have any such thing as right or wrong, rather it all depends on your imagination. But as you progress through the game, you’ll realize that it can become a compelling story.

Don’t worry about typos. The AI can detect and understand the context and take care of the actions based on your inputs.

As with the Storyteller tool, you can ‘Retry’ to get a different response from the AI in case you didn’t like the output.

I believe text adventures are a great way for fiction authors to write stories, or at least create a plotline that they can later use to create comics, short stories, or novels.

3. AI Image Generation

Novel AI has integrated the text-to-image feature on the platform that allows you to illustrate your story (think Anime, Manga, or Web Novel).

If you’re not already aware of text-to-image AI tools, here’s a quick summary: You give a description text and the AI generates an image based on what you describe.

Example?

Let’s say: “A dystopian landscape with high rugged mountains and thunderstorms on a distant planet in an unknown galaxy. A massive UFO hovering atop the mountains.”

That’s a good enough description, and the AI tool will use this information to create an image.

Here is a sample image based on the description:

The good thing is that all AI-generated images are unique. You can use them in your comics, stories, and novels without any copyright infringement.

Unfortunately, this feature is not available with the free plan.

Novel AI offers two models for image creation from text:

• Novel AI Diffusion Anime (Curated and Full)
• Novel AI Diffusion Furry (Beta)

The first one will allow you to create anime-themed images while the latter will allow furry and anthropomorphic animal-themed content.

Sadly though, the paid plans also have limitations. You can check the details and limitations here.

Novel AI Pricing

Novel AI offers four plans that include:

Paper: Free Trial

• Lasts for 100 free text generations with the second-best AI Storyteller (Euterpe).
• Add up to approximately 8192 characters of Memory.
• Up to 100 AI text-to-speech generation.

Tablet: $10 per month

• Unlimited text generations
• Access to the second-best AI Storyteller (Euterpe) from Novel AI along with other low-end models.
• Approximately 4096 characters of Memory.
• 1000 Anlas every month. Anlas is the currency for Custom AI Module training and AI image generation.
• Advanced AI text-to-speech generation.
• AI text-to-image generation.

Scroll: $15 per month

• Unlimited text generations
• Access to the second-best AI Storyteller (Euterpe) from Novel AI along with other low-end models.
• Approximately 8192 characters of Memory.
• 1000 Anlas every month. Anlas is the currency for Custom AI Module training and AI image generation.
• Advanced AI text-to-speech generation.
• AI text-to-image generation.

Opus: $25 per month

• Unlimited text generations
• Access to the best AI Storyteller (Krake) from Novel AI along with all other models.
• Approximately 8192 characters of Memory.
• 1000 Anlas every month. Anlas is the currency for Custom AI Module training and AI image generation.
• Advanced AI text-to-speech generation.
• AI text-to-image generation.
• Access to experimental features.

Novel AI Review: Novel AI Alternatives

Novel AI vs. Jasper AI

Jasper AI is a powerful AI writing tool, but unlike Novel AI, it is not targeted specifically for fiction, short stories, comics, and novels. Jasper offers 50+ templates, one of which is Creative Story.

You can use this template to generate story ideas, but unfortunately, the output can help only to overcome writer’s block. The fine controls that Novel AI offers through its settings are not available with Jasper.

Jasper has something called Teams plan that helps to create long-form content.

That’s understandable because Jasper is more geared toward content writers. It is suitable for blog posts, emails, meta descriptions, and so on.

Novel AI vs. Rytr

Like Jasper, Rytr is not a story creator. It targets copywriters, marketers, entrepreneurs, etc. If you need to write a blog post, an ad copy, an email, etc. Rytr is a perfect choice.

Even though they have a story writing template called ‘Story Plot’ that helps to generate compelling storylines, you don’t get the flexibility of Novel AI.

Instead of offering free trials, Rytr has a forever free plan.

Novel AI vs. Sudowrite

Sudowrite is a true competitor of Novel AI. It works more like a virtual writing partner that helps to brainstorm ideas, create new scenes, and even offer beta feedback on your completed novel or story.

Like Novel AI, Sudowrite can write the next sentence or paragraph, or plot point. It doesn’t offer the fine controls of Novel AI, but the simplicity of the interface is brilliant and user-friendly.

If you don’t like something as complex as Novel AI, you are probably better off with Sudowrite.

Novel AI Review: Summary

Novel AI is one of the most powerful AI story-generator tools for fiction writers, storytellers, and novel authors. It can help to overcome writer’s block or even help with AI-assisted authorship through dialogue development.

However, the tool can be incredibly difficult to master for those who are new to AI Novel writing. It works as a GPT-powered sandbox for your imagination and gives unprecedented freedom with the ability to custom-train the AI.

The added image-generation feature is a blessing for those who want to create illustrated comics or stories.

Overall, it is a great AI writing partner, but it can never be a complete replacement for the human mind.

Novel AI Review: FAQs

Does Novel AI cost money?

Yes, it does! However, they do have a free tier that offers up to 100 text generation credits. Once you run out of the credits, you must upgrade to a paid plan that starts at $10 a month.

Can I use NovelAI for free?

Yes, you can use NovelAI for free with limited features. The free version, one of the Novel AI Plans, allows you to explore basic functionalities of the AI Story-Writing Assistant. However, for access to advanced features like the AI Manuscript Editor and Visualize Characters with Image Generation, you may need to consider their paid plans.

Is NovelAI better than ChatGPT?

NovelAI and ChatGPT serve different purposes. While ChatGPT is renowned among the best AI Writers for its conversational capabilities, NovelAI specializes as an AI to Generate Text specifically for creative writing. NovelAI, with its Storyteller Enables feature and AI Models Trained on Real Literature, offers a more tailored approach for story generation.

What is NovelAI used for?

NovelAI is primarily used as an AI text generators tool for creative writers. It aids in story ideation with Lorebook. Lorebook is Novel AI’s Digital repository for storing story elements. Additionally, Text Adventure is a Collaborative feature in NovelAI, allowing users to engage in interactive story creation.

Can I download NovelAI?

Currently, NovelAI is a web-based platform and cannot be downloaded. It provides an online AI Manuscript Editor and Storyteller Enables feature for users to create and edit their stories directly on the platform.

How does NovelAI’s Image Generation feature work?

The Novel AI Image Generation function allows you to Visualize Characters with Image Generation. This feature uses AI to create unique illustrations based on text descriptions, enhancing the storytelling experience.

What are the key features of NovelAI’s Theme Editor?

Novel AI’s Theme Editor is a customizable tool that lets users adjust the interface to suit their Creative Pursuits. It includes options for tweaking the layout, fonts, and colors, providing a personalized writing environment.

Can NovelAI be used as an alternative to traditional story writing?

Yes, NovelAI can serve as a Novelai Alternative to traditional story writing methods. It combines AI Text Generators with Two Different AI Modes for story generation and editing, making it a versatile tool for modern writers.

What makes NovelAI stand out among other AI Generators?

NovelAI stands out due to its Intelligent Repository that Remembers and adapts to user inputs, and its AI Models Trained on Real Literature. These features make it uniquely capable of producing high-quality, literary-level content.

Is Novel AI better than AI Dungeon?

It depends on what you are looking for. Novel AI can generate structured text and focuses on the development of dialogue, action, and story. It can also adapt to different writing styles – something that AI Dungeon cannot do.

Moreover, Novel AI can even import stories from the AI Dungeon Content Archive Tool (AIDCAT). AI Dungeon will not allow you to import anything from Novel AI.