AI models are about to revolutionise creative writing.
This is an extract from?New World Same Humans, a weekly newsletter on trends, technology, and society by David Mattin.
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This week, Google offered a glimpse of the future of creative writing.
The company hosted a media event in Manhattan to showcase various AI research projects. Among them were a flood forecasting system, and further glimpses of the quest I’ve written about often — most?recently in?New Week #103?— to create everyday helper robots that can?respond to ordinary (i.e complex and nuanced) spoken language.
But the project that most caught my eye? It’s a tool intended to supercharge fiction writers by marrying their creativity with the incredible power of Google’s large language model, LaMDA.
Wordcraft works just like a standard text editor, but with an AI fuelled twist. Writers can ask the platform to, for example, rewrite sentences to make them shorter or funnier. They can ask Wordcraft to write descriptions of objects or people that appear in their story. They can even ask the tool for new plot ideas by entering the prompt:?what happens next?
As part of their research process Google ran workshops with 13 established writers, who used the tool to help them craft short stories. Those stories — and more on what was learned — are?now publicly available. The verdict of these writers? Wordcraft isn’t perfect — and it’s far from a?replacement?for human creativity — but it does generate unexpected new story directions and ideas.
Wordcraft made, in short, for a great?co-writer.
? NWSH?Take:?
There’s a longstanding principle adhered to by writers working together on a book or script. Never shoot down your co-writer’s suggestions with a?no; instead always start with a?yes, and.
What Google are building here is an amazing?yes, and?machine: a writing partner that produces an endless stream of ideas, suggestions, and provocations. What’s more, this partner is always on hand, never tires, and doesn’t ask for a salary. There will be a large language model on the desktop of many novelists, and in the writing room for many Netflix scripted dramas, before long.
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But writers (and readers) shouldn’t worry that these tools are about to strip human creativity out of the narrative arts. These experiments show, too, that we’re a long way from an AI that can generate a full novel or script.
LaMDA struggles to keep its story straight for any length of time; it will, for example, kill off a character and then have that character walk into a room a few hundred words later. This kind of narrative inconsistency is a common problem across all large language models, including OpenAI's GPT-3, and it's one big reason that we are, for now, some way from a full-scale AI novelist or screenwriter.
Still, we’re at the outset of something new. It’s perhaps best thought of as the emergence of the?writer as creative director, able to generate new ideas, scenes, and characters and deploy them at will.
What new narrative forms will emerge out of the generative AI revolution??How will generative models reshape the novel, scripted dramas, and video games? The GPT-3 text adventure game AI Dungeon, for example, points towards the emergence of new kinds of interactive fiction, in which the inputs of the reader help shape the unfolding of the story.
NWSH?will keep watching. It may even run a few experiments of its own.
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You've just read an extract from this week's?New World Same Humans, a weekly newsletter on trends, technology, and society by David Mattin.
Also in this week's instalment:
???? Europe eyes a future without gas.
?? Elon Musk has acquired Twitter and a host of intractable problems
...and much more!