Researchers study how humans and AI can write together by designing large interaction datasets.

This article is an existential crisis. It is written by a professional writer, writing about artificial intelligence that helps writers write. There’s a lot of nagging doubt in my mind about this. Is that okay? I mean, shouldn’t humans write their own content? And does this mean the writing is on the wall for an entire profession? Will there be no more writers? We all have to ask ourselves what our roles in this brave new world will be.

The italicized text above and below was written by a large language model. While professional writers might not fear for their careers just yet, at least by the example above, the model seems to do a good job grasping the topic at hand and sensing its co-writer’s (my) existential dread.

Meet “CoAuthor.” It’s an interface, a dataset, and an experiment all in one. CoAuthor comes from Mina Lee, a doctoral student in computer science at Stanford University, and her advisor Percy Liang, a Stanford associate professor of computer science and director of the Center for Research on Foundation Models, born out of the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence, and her collaborator, Qian Yang, an assistant professor at Cornell University.

Meet CoAuthor, an Experiment in Human-AI Collaborative Writing