Creative Writing with an AI-Powered Writing Assistant: Perspectives from Professional Writers
Recent developments in natural language generation (NLG) using neural
language models have brought us closer than ever to the goal of building
AI-powered creative writing tools. However, most prior work on human-AI
collaboration in the creative writing domain has evaluated new systems with
amateur writers, typically in contrived user studies of limited scope. In this
work, we commissioned 13 professional, published writers from a diverse set of
creative writing backgrounds to craft stories using Wordcraft, a text editor
with built-in AI-powered writing assistance tools. Using interviews and
participant journals, we discuss the potential of NLG to have significant
impact in the creative writing domain--especially with respect to
brainstorming, generation of story details, world-building, and research
assistance. Experienced writers, more so than amateurs, typically have
well-developed systems and methodologies for writing, as well as distinctive
voices and target audiences. Our work highlights the challenges in building for
these writers; NLG technologies struggle to preserve style and authorial voice,
and they lack deep understanding of story contents. In order for AI-powered
writing assistants to realize their full potential, it is essential that they
take into account the diverse goals and expertise of human writers.
Authors
Daphne Ippolito, Ann Yuan, Andy Coenen, Sehmon Burnam