Isabelle Levent

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 writing

They thought it would be particularly useful for writing in a certain voice or character, or for coming up with thematically exciting words. They wondered what kind of thesaurus would come from a corpus of nautical novels (like Moby Dick)

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.”

This is posing questions to writers everywhere: Which parts of writing are so tedious you’d be happy to see them go? Which parts bring you the inexplicable joy of creating something from nothing? And what is it about writing you hold most dear? 

The issue here does not concern how many jobs will be created, how much income generated, how many pollutants added... Rather, the issue has to do with the ways in which choices about technology have important consequences for the form and quality of human associations.

Like oil and land, data are a common that is commodified by private actors for profits. The commons being commodified is our essence as humans: our interactions with society at large.