Abstract: 

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.

In this talk, we will present the Dramatron writing tool and present how we can unleash your creative writing potential.

Bio: 

Dr. Piotr Mirowski is a Staff Research Scientist at DeepMind. His research on artificial intelligence covers the subjects of reinforcement learning, navigation, weather and climate forecasting, as well as a socio-technical systems approach to human-machine collaboration and to computational creativity. He is the author of over 60 papers that have been published in Nature, Genome Biology, Clinical Neurophysiology or at ICLR, AAAI and NeurIPS. Piotr studied computer science in France at ENSEEIHT Toulouse and obtained his PhD in computer science in 2011 at New York University, with a thesis supervised by Prof. Yann LeCun (Outstanding Dissertation Award, 2011). A trained actor himself, Piotr founded and directs Improbotics, a theatre company where human actors and robots improvise live comedy performances and investigate the use of AI for artistic human and machine-based co-creation. https://piotrmirowski.com