Creative Co-author

Creative Co-author was a writing tool for the first draft: getting words onto the page, not finishing them. It worked like type-ahead pushed much further. As you wrote, it offered words and phrases along the way, ahead of the cursor and behind it. It did not write for you; the suggestions were there to keep a draft moving, on the theory that stalling can shut down the whole writing process, and that an imperfect suggestion which provokes a better idea has still done its job.

It ran as a Knight Lab Studio project over two quarters of 2018, before large language models made text generation ordinary; the suggestions came from the off-the-shelf language models of the day. Joe Germuska and I led it; the spring students were Brett Bergstrom, Jeff Birori, Lucy Dwyer, Corinne Osnos, and Yani Xie. The first quarter worked on how looking ahead differs from lurking behind, what interface lets a writer take or ignore a suggestion without breaking stride, and whether suggestions could take on a style or a fictional world. The second built on that: better word choices for a given context, suggestions at the level of a phrase or a sentence, and an experience that keeps the author writing from their own mind rather than reacting to the machine.

The project's illustration on its Knight Lab Studio page: a writer at a keyboard, a figure at a tall page speaking a suggestion into it — From the project's page at Knight Lab Studio.

Project page at Knight Lab Studio

A drafting tool for getting words down