This is just an advanced madlibs generator. As a copywriter who dabbles in creative writing I see nothing here that would help me. It's just too "dumb".
Which is the whole point, really: it doesn't facilitate the actual "writing" so much as the "thinking," at which stage you're still developing ideas and seeing how they fit together.
Several generations of writers (and other artists) have found great results cutting their work up and rearranging it to find deeper insights into the work they might still produce: Burroughs, Bowie, and others!
Aleatoric processes are more interesting than the results, in my opinion. Too easy and too disconnected from the human to resonate (beyond the isolated snippets that get trotted out, like photos of parking meters that look like faces). And that disconnection is why software like this doesn't interest me. If you know what you want to write you don't need this. If you don't know, there are better, richer, more fulfilling ways to come up with ideas than randomly permuting text.
That's fair. Part of anyone's acceptance of the method would have to do with their acceptance of this tenet:
Producing a work of written art requires constant discovery
and guessing—because all works of art are works of exploration and discovery.
Thus InkWell merely seems (to me) like it would be useful as a kind of servant--a tool to show you other plausible variants of your text, and thus spur the creative process.
But if you already know what you're going to write and how, then godspeed--you're in a much better situation than most writers :)
As a creative writer, I don't see much here to interest me either. For me, reading variations does nothing to get my thinking going. Only the process of writing itself gets my brain in gear. Everyone is different, of course, and this may be useful to some, but for me it doesn't seem like it would be beneficial at all.
I feel like I am missing something here. Is this a program that actually exists or something that they are currently working on and will be available at some later date? I don't see any way to try it out. Its a compelling idea though.
It takes your original text and makes it easy to execute different drafts of that text based on stylistic templates calculated from famous authors. Kind of like Hemingwayapp.com.
Creativity in writing takes a couple of ingredients: being prepared to notice, wide ranging and non-judgmental production of drafts, and a selection and revision process guided by aesthetics. In a sense it’s like serendipity. With InkWell we’ve tried to explore writerly creativity in a creative way—by letting the program emerge from a haze of half-known ideas
The most irritating aspect of creative writing is that one constantly needs to find synonyms for things that one already has a perfect word for, but which cannot be used out of fear for sounding repetitive. If this tool can solve that, it is already a huge win.
> Some of this work was supported by DARPA
I wonder how the DoD would put such a tool to use :)
I'll spoil it: the DoD wants natural language generation that would influence people on social media, like Twitter.
Say the DoD doesn't want resistance fighters (like you) to meet somewhere. They'll generate a barrage of tweets about how that's a bad idea. Those tweets don't influence you directly, but they influence people you follow on twitter, who do influence you (because by nature of twitter you follow those who influence you). You don't meet, because your friends--who have your best interests at heart (because their your friends)--told you not to.
When this works as intended, the DoD is able to influence people without being easily traced.
It's a little horrifying, which makes it fascinating.
One more comment about the talk: rpg shows his humor, strong opinions, and software wisdom in this talk. Again, I recommend it.
Well, that is a good link, but I'm still hoping for a tool that allows me to change words inside my text-editor (semi-automatically), using highlighting with a dropdown of possible alternatives.
I don't mean to bash the value of this software. For some, it might be a great thing. For me, however, I think a thesaurus would be a lot easier to use.
> With InkWell we’ve tried to explore writerly creativity in a creative way—by letting the program emerge from a haze of half-known ideas
The half-known ideas (templates) presented were not the author's own, instead they were borrowed from other writers. This isn't writing, it's sampling.
RPG is an accomplished poet himself, one of the few computer scientists with an MFA. He presented some of these poems at a poetry workshop, and they were retrieved well enough.
Could we call it computer-assisted writing? Simply calling it "not writing" doesn't really recognize the way writers and other artists have used algorithms as part of their respective processes for many decades.
When you take an original piece created by another source, and suggest modifications for strength, clarity or other qualitative values, I believe we simply call that editing.
