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Co-writing longform narratives with Dramatron (arxiv.org)
69 points by dr_dshiv on Oct 1, 2022 | hide | past | pdf | 5 comments on HN

In plain words: Dramatron builds a script step by step—title, characters, beats, settings, then dialogue—so the story stays consistent instead of drifting like a model writing straight through. Fifteen theatre and film professionals co-wrote scripts with it and found it a useful but imperfect partner.

Abstract · Co-Writing Screenplays and Theatre Scripts with Language Models: An Evaluation by Industry Professionals

Language models are increasingly attracting interest from writers. However, such models lack long-range semantic coherence, limiting their usefulness for longform creative writing. We address this limitation by applying language models hierarchically, in a system we call Dramatron. By building structural context via prompt chaining, Dramatron can generate coherent scripts and screenplays complete with title, characters, story beats, location descriptions, and dialogue. We illustrate Dramatron's usefulness as an interactive co-creative system with a user study of 15 theatre and film industry professionals. Participants co-wrote theatre scripts and screenplays with Dramatron and engaged in open-ended interviews. We report critical reflections both from our interviewees and from independent reviewers who watched stagings of the works to illustrate how both Dramatron and hierarchical text generation could be useful for human-machine co-creativity. Finally, we discuss the suitability of Dramatron for co-creativity, ethical considerations -- including plagiarism and bias -- and participatory models for the design and deployment of such tools.

Piotr Mirowski, Kory W. Mathewson, Jaylen Pittman, Richard Evans
arXiv:2209.14958 · cs.HC, cs.CL · submitted Sep 29, 2022
abstract · pdf · html · 102 pages, 7 figures

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> If GPT-10 is just like GPT-3, no extra bells and whistles, just bigger, and able to read whole novels and watch whole movies and answer subtle and open-ended questions about characters and their conflicts and motivation, and tell us when to laugh, I promise to post a YouTube video admitting I was wrong.

-- Gary Marcus

https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/does-ai-really-need-a-para...

This isn't exactly what he described, but it'd make me pretty worried if I were him.

> This isn't exactly what he described, but it'd make me pretty worried if I were him.

Admitting when we are wrong should be the default, not a cause for worry. That someone is willing to do so in this age should to be celebrated (or at the very least encouraged).

Gary has directly said he "hopes" he's wrong, so I think he'd be surprised and happy. BTW, his primary criticism of current AI approaches like GPT is he thinks it unlikely simply scaling the size of training data for models like this will yield AGI.
I would be very happy if this was good enough to help me finish the bedtime story I've constructed for my 9 year old. I've clearly lost the plot and she keeps poking holes in it.
Reminds me of the credits from the Futurama soap opera All my circuits.