I'll let you in on a secret. Internally, we had a bet as to what this new tool was going to be. We had a whole bunch of wild theories and read some twitter threads that made us even more curious. We've graded each of the theories below to name and shame.
"Schema generation through AI"
~Hrithik
- Not close at all, at least he mentioned something about AI
- Grade: D-
"Document generation with AI"
~Shreyas
- Pretty much bob on the money great job
- Grade: A+
"A Marketing tool that improves user experience when writing articles"
~Sne
- Somewhat close to the mark, but no mention of AI
- Grade: B+
"Sanity notion type thing, away from publishing, more on planning, organising content better inside of a tool"
~Jono
- Are you even trying? See me after-school for more homework
- Grade: F-
Now that public shaming is out of the way, let's move onto the actual experience of writing inside of Sanity Create.
Hello world
The first time you setup an article you're greeted with this:
This gives you a great primer into some of the functionality that Sanity Create gives you. Honestly, this is one of the few quick start guides that I actually would read from start to finish, it gives you a quick run down and, more importantly, gets you to actually action some of the functionality you would use.
Ghostwrite
Okay, this is probably what you're all here for. Ghostwrite is an ever-present little dot to the right of your current line. Think HAL-3000 but for writers block. What's really cool about it is that if you're stuck on a specific sentence and struggle to finish it... you can just place your cursor where you want the AI to continue from and it will generate a relevant continuation for you (this was written by Ghostwrite).
I imagine you can already guess why this is so powerful. However, you may not know what AI models are powering this. Now I assumed it would be something boring like GPT, but it's actually Anthropic's opus and haiku models. For those of you who don't recognise the two names, Opus is the smart but expensive one and Haiku is better for simpler tasks. My guess is they're using the simpler one for the ghostwrite expanding functionality (when you hit CMD + .) on a piece of text, and the more comprehensive one for significant chunks of AI generation.
Notes
Notes are your method of opinionating the ghostwrite. For example you can throw together a note of currently six different categories.
- No category
- Fact
- Context
- Style
- Inspiration
- Ignore
From what we can tell there are two main functions of these notes:
- For your human editors it's basically just a virtual sticky-note, which helps them organise and categorise the context of their writing
- For your Ghostwriter, it's a whole god-damn data bank of information that's going to opinionate the way it helps you with your writing, think better predictions, closer to your companies copywriting style. Scary.
There's more functionality you can squeeze out these notes, but realistically you'll probably use them to:
- Write up a tone of voice document that you can feed into the AI itself so it sounds more like your company's brand
- Referring back to company assets when stuck on a mental block
- Virtual post-it notes for important points relating to the article
- Office locations, company VAT numbers, who is the head of the IT department, boring stuff like that
What we loved
I especially appreciate the "Zen Mode" functionality. You can either grab or click the sidebar and it'll shrink to leave you with near enough nothing on the screen. It's a nice touch.
You can start Ghostwriting with CMD + .. It feels natural, and if you want to continue writing with AI all you have to do is hit tab.
Here's the notes in all their glory. Don't worry, your AI assistant read them before you did... They're also fluent in basically every language in the world. Feeling threatend yet?
What we want improved
- Because we started writing this article on the way back, on a train from London, and the network was absolute garbage, I think some sort of continuity to retain data in patchy signal - wouldn't go amiss.
- Or you know - the UK could actually sort it's signal coverage out... But I know which one is more likely to happen.
- We already know that it's on its way, but the sooner you can directly publish from Sanity Create to Sanity Studio, the happier I'm going to be as an editor.
What the future holds
As Sanity Create continues to evolve, we expect to see a hell of a lot more integrations. I'm curious as to how they're going to solve media sharing between the two platforms. My guess is, that at some point this writing functionality is going to overhaul the portable text completely and we'll actually have this functionality directly inside of Sanity Studio.
Either way, the more seamless the experience is between - writing, ideation and actually pushing it out there - the easier it is to adopt this as the baseline for all your content workflows. It's an incredible start towards a more contextually curated, less shallow AI editorial experience, not just another ChatGPT wrapper.
