Creative Writing with an AI-Powered Writing Assistant: Perspectives from Professional Writers
Daphne Ippolito, Ann Yuan, Andy Coenen, Sehmon Burnam

TL;DR
This study explores how professional writers perceive and utilize AI-powered writing tools, highlighting their potential benefits and current limitations in supporting creative storytelling and world-building.
Contribution
It provides insights from professional writers on the use of AI writing assistants, emphasizing the challenges in maintaining style and understanding story content.
Findings
Writers find AI tools helpful for brainstorming and research.
AI struggles to preserve individual style and voice.
Deep understanding of story content remains a challenge for AI.
Abstract
Recent developments in natural language generation (NLG) using neural language models have brought us closer than ever to the goal of building AI-powered creative writing tools. However, most prior work on human-AI collaboration in the creative writing domain has evaluated new systems with amateur writers, typically in contrived user studies of limited scope. In this work, we commissioned 13 professional, published writers from a diverse set of creative writing backgrounds to craft stories using Wordcraft, a text editor with built-in AI-powered writing assistance tools. Using interviews and participant journals, we discuss the potential of NLG to have significant impact in the creative writing domain--especially with respect to brainstorming, generation of story details, world-building, and research assistance. Experienced writers, more so than amateurs, typically have well-developed…
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Taxonomy
TopicsTopic Modeling · Multimodal Machine Learning Applications · Educational Games and Gamification
