Hello everyone. My name is Oloff Biermann and today I'll be presenting with my co-authors Ning Ma
and Dongwook Yoon. We are part of the Designing for People research cluster at the University
of British Columbia. This study is about personal values that writers assign to the writing process
and how such values influence their perception of AI writers. Here's a spoiler. We found that
such personal values drive how writers want to control AI in the writing process. There are two
types of values. Emotional values like enjoyment and ownership are about how they feel as they
are actively involved in writing. Writers who prioritize emotional values want to be
in control of the writing process. Other writers prioritize productivity of AI-assisted writing.
If AI can write more and better, the productivity-driven writers are happy to
give away the control of the writing process
to let the AI do the writing. All right let's start. The
large-scale language model GPT-3 is a generative language model developed by OpenAI.
It is adaptable to a variety of high-level writing tasks. For example, it wrote this entire op-ed
creative essay. Large-scale language models like GPT-3 now approach the human level. In some cases,
they produce writing that is indistinguishable from something written by a human.
Advances of such models open up a new kind of AI-assisted writing tool, if not replacing human
writers. They are special because AI's writing capability has advanced in a very particular
process of writing called translating. Let me explain. Writing is essentially made up
of three interleaved processes. First, planning is to generate and organize ideas for writing.
Second, translating is to turn the ideas into words by doing actual writing. And then the writers
review and edit their text. Modern large-scale language models like GPT-3 can directly support
translating. This sets them apart from existing co-ideation tools and grammar checkers.
These language models can actually turn ideas into words. Unlike writers, they don't
suffer from writer's block. If we can harness their writing capacity, the AI can act as a true writing
companion instead of just being a tool. This can significantly boost the writer's productivity.
It's almost like having a ghostwriter. But is more and better writing really the ultimate goal?
Our study raises a critical question to broaden the current conversation about
human-AI co-writing. This discourse is currently centered around productivity
as the success metric. We would like to bring in "what do writers care about?" and "how do they
write?" into the picture. Hence, we investigate how personal values and writing practices influence
the way writers perceive AI writing companions. It is vital to have a clear understanding of the
expectations and preferences that writers have to inform the design of AI writing companions.
This brings up the question: What primary considerations impact storywriters' perception of
co-writing with an AI companion? And how? To answer this question, we ran a design workbook
study. For the workbook we created five designs of AI writing companions. These designs capture
vary control mechanisms for the AI writer such as getting sentence recommendations from user-given
keywords or having the full story text generated based on a structured outline that the
writer provides. We exposed our participants to these designs and then we interviewed them on
how they perceive different control mechanisms and how well these fit to their writing process.
There were a total of 20 storywriters that participated in our study. Among them, 7 were
hobbyists and 13 were professionals doing freelance writing jobs on Upwork.com. Having this
diversity allowed us to capture how different purposes of writing shape the writer's attitude
towards AI support. Now onto the findings. To give a high level overview of our findings, we show
that personal values influence the writer's control preference for AI companions.
Some writers prioritize the emotional values of writing while others emphasize writing
productivity. These two main opposing forces shape how writers want to retain
or give up control over writing. I'd now like to go into these findings in more detail.
Writers who prioritize the emotional values of writing see writing as a labor of love.
This included all the hobbyists as well as some professionals. We saw that these writers
want to do translating by themselves. They want to enjoy the process of expressing their ideas,
despite challenges and frustration. They also desire a sense of ownership and integrity in their
writing process. For example, H2 said: "It's a labor of love, not a labor of hate. If you look at your
piece of work and you're just hating yourself and going into depressionville, it's like
the piece is done; just throw it away." Writers like them see writing as a difficult task which
should provide enjoyment. They achieve pleasure and fulfillment by persevering in the writing process
They do not want to continue writing if they don't find it emotionally rewarding.
Now, going back to the writing processes I mentioned at the beginning,
these writers would like to be in control of the translating process.
They want AI companions to be limited to planning, where the AI acts as an ideation tool.
This kind of co-ideation allows them to maintain a sense of ownership over their writing since
they would be in control of expressing the story ideas that the AI has generated.
On the other hand, some professional writers prioritize productivity. They primarily saw
writing as an occupation for supporting their livelihood, instead of a labor of love.
Here, P13 describes how partnering with AI would augment their natural writing ability. They say
that: "It would be really a partnership. An AI like this would be partnering with me to make me better
at what I'm doing, better than what I can do on my own, and to make my writing more efficient."
So, writers like them would like AI companions to act as co-writers
which will lead the process of translating ideas into words. They envision that the AI
writer would allow them to boost their writing efficiency. Ultimately, they hope that AI writers
would reduce their project turnaround time and help to meet clients' deadlines.
We identified three other factors that impact writers' perception of AI co-writers.
These are: trust, self-confidence, and writing method. Please check our paper for more details
about these factors and their design implications. Our study generates design implications for
human-AI co-writing. Future AI companion design should respect personal values of writing.
Therefore, AI companions need to adapt to the character of the writer in a tactful way.
In a sense, they should behave like a human collaborator which adapts to their co-authors.
To do this, the AI needs to match the role that writers want it to play in their writing process.
For writers that want an ideation tool, the AI should give inspirational suggestions.
But for those that want a writing partner, the AI should behave like a ghostwriter.
Our contribution highlights how personal values affect the way writers perceive AI
companions. This sets the stage for AI writer design which respects writers' value structure
and their writing practices. We look forward to your questions and feedback. Thank you.