Creative Writing with an AI-Powered Writing Assistant: Perspectives from Professional Writers

The “story seeds” control allowed writers to experiment with using Wordcraft to generate ideas at the very beginning of the writing process. MT described the “story seeds” control as giving her “a place on my computer to go that looked like a blank page but did not behave as such.” E

A couple participants found success using the chatbot as a convenient search engine alternative (KL, WT). KL wrote: “It’s kind of great to use the chat interface and treat LaMDA as a thesaurus, quote finder, and general research assistant.”

There are a couple reasons why Wordcraft may have struggled with style and voice... Another reason could have been limitations of the underlying model. LaMDA and other similar language models are trained to be most confident on the kind of text they see most often–typically internet data. However, professional creative writers are usually wri

A recurring theme in participant feedback was that the language model lacked taste and intentionality...In contrast, good writers are skilled not only in producing but also discerning good language. In other words, they have taste, the ability to decide why one sentence is interesting while another is not.