ALGOWRITTEN: MOZFEST 2021

The research project "Algowritten," a partnership involving the School of Digital Arts at Manchester Metropolitan University and Mozilla Festival, delved into exploring biases and new affordances in creative writing with algorithms and was part of the MozFest 2021 Building Trustworthy AI working group. Utilizing AIDungeon, a text adventure game driven by OpenAI’s GPT-3, three stories were crafted to navigate the interplay between AI and human creative writing, investigating styles, patterns, and collaborative authorship.

The stories collectively explored the symbiotic relationship between the AI and human writer, uncovering the potential and challenges in automated content generation, managing plot directives, and integrating algorithmic tools into the narrative development process, all while fostering new methods and potential efficiencies in digital storytelling. “The Tambopato River" by Emma Nuttall, demonstrated the AI's proficiency in mirroring tone and narrative beats when fed with a pre-existing story. Meanwhile, "Robot Salvation" minimized human authorial intervention, emphasizing an AI-led narrative and highlighting the human’s intrinsic role within autonomous systems. The third story, "What if I Said All Men Were Liars," contemplated the inherent biases in AI-generated content, navigating through gendered interactions and behaviors in the narrative.