Member-only story
Google’s Wordcraft: An AI Writing Tool Powered by LaMDA
What do professional creative writers think about these tools?
Amidst the rapid emergence of new AI writing tools and the consolidation of old ones, Google has been testing its own: Wordcraft. The company brought together a group of professional authors to try out the tool in a project called the Wordcraft Writers Workshop — and the results are impressive.
Wordcraft, which went under the radar for half a year, was originally released in March. Based on LaMDA — the non-sentient language model that went viral over a conversation on AI consciousness — Wordcraft is presumably more capable than any GPT-3-based tool out there (that is, practically all tools out there).
This innovative workshop was unveiled in this year’s AI@ event in which the company shares the latest news on AI research. It was hosted earlier this week (I recommend you watch it). A whole section was, unsurprisingly, focused on generative AI. Two announcements grabbed my attention.
First, a digression from today’s topic: a notable improvement to text-to-video models.
Last month, Google published not one but two models that can generate videos from prompts. Phenaki shines at storytelling — it can hold time coherence for up to 2 minutes. Its major shortcoming is a lack of visual quality. That’s the specialty of Imagen Video, the other model, which creates short high-resolution clips.
Now, Google has merged both models into one, to leverage their strengths and overcome their most obvious limitations. The combination model can produce long coherent and high-quality videos. No doubt this is the current state of the art in text-to-video and the next step toward text-to-movie and text-to-videogames models.
The second announcement that caught my eye was Wordcraft and the Writers Workshop. Let’s see what this AI tool can do and what impression it caused on this group of published authors.
Wordcraft — an AI writing tool for creative fiction
Wordcraft — in contrast to almost every other AI writing tool — is intended for creative writing, storytelling, and experimental fiction. There are some exceptions…
