AlphaWrite: AI that improves at writing by evolving its own stories

Summary

You can try AlphaWrite out here Code Repository: AlphaWrite on GitHub Large languagenference time compute Scaling for Writing models have demonstrated remarkable improvements in performance through increased inference-time compute on quantitative reasoning tasks, particularly in mathematics and coding. However, the creative domain—where outputs are inherently highly subjective and difficult to evaluate—has seen limited exploration of systematic approaches to scale inference-time compute effectively. In this work, we introduce Alpha Writing, a novel framework for scaling inference-time compute in creative text generation. Inspired by AlphaEvolve and other evolutionary algorithms, our approach combines iterative story generation with Elo-based evaluation to systematically improve narrative quality. Rather than relying on single-shot generation or simple resampling, Alpha Writing creates a dynamic ecosystem where stories compete, evolve, and improve through multiple generations. Our method addresses a critical gap in the field: while we can easily scale compute for tasks with clear correctness criteria, creative domains have lacked principled approaches for leveraging additional inference resources. By treating story generation as an evolutionary process guided by pairwise preferences, we demonstrate that creative output quality can be systematically improved through increased compute allocation. We further demonstrate the scalability of these methods by distilling the enhanced stories back into the base model, creating a stronger foundation for subsequent rounds of Alpha Writing. This recursive cycle—where improved outputs become training data for an enhanced model that can generate even better stories—offers promising potential for self improving writing models. Methodology Overview Alpha Writing employs an evolutionary approach to improve story quality through iterative generation and selection. The process consists of four main stages: (1) diverse initial story gen...