Google is known to be among the pioneers in the AI field, and throughout the years, the company has developed a number of AI products.
One of which, is LaMDA. The conversational AI model which stands for "Language Model for Dialogue Applications," is a family of conversational neural language models developed by Google.
Google introduced it as its "breakthrough conversation technology."
Realizing the potential of this AI, Google developed a new AI from it, and calls it the 'Wordcraft'.
What it does, is allowing creative writers create new stories, co-written by an AI.
But unlike other AI-powered writing tools in the market, Google introduces Wordcraft as a prototype that resembles a "text editor with purpose," built into a web-based word processor.
What makes Wordcraft different is it’s ability to help create fictional work, as Google describes it, by rewriting phrases or directing users into making a sentence funnier.
It can also describe objects if asked or generate prompts.
According to its GitHub page:
More or less, Wordcraft is like a tool that is sort of like a text editor, but in the form of a writing partner, meant to help create open-ended storylines, and add more text to the end of the story.
Beyond the continuous-text generation paradigm that is widely known, extensive work has been done to incorporate additional control signals like event sequences, desired topic and story titles.
And Wordcraft here, takes the form of a tool that can fill-in-the-blank tasks.
To test Wordcraft, Google created a workshop with 13 professional writers to see how well the prototype worked.
The result is astonishing, but pretty basic at the same time.
In the end, the AI couldn't really picture writing a full story.
According to its research paper, the authors said that they also "encountered failure modes."
For example, some of the outputs produced were inconsistent in quality, some superb, some nonsensical. On top of that, slight tweaks in prompt phrasing caused large deviations in output quality.
So obviously, at least in its initial prototype version, Wordcraft cannot fully grasp what it's supposed to do.
The tool isn't at all great at creating a narrative style article, and is only able to produce a very averaged, and/or cliched writing.
Here, the writers that worked with the project seemed to appreciate Wordcraft, but only as a way to spark new ideas.
“One clear finding was that using LaMDA to write full stories is a dead end. It’s a much more effective tool when it’s used to add spice,” Douglas Eck, senior research director at Google Research, said at the AI@ event.
The AI simply couldn't work on its own.
They unanimously agreed the tool wasn’t going to replace authors anytime soon.