Companies are hiring playwrights and poets to create meaningful AI
When you talk to an AI chatbot, who do you think
writes those professional, peppy responses? There’s certainly an
algorithm behind the scenes, but humans put together those phrases. Tech
companies are creating teams of writers, including playwrights, poets,
and novelists, to help write lines that don’t sound like they came from a
machine. The work can range from creating a consistent character for a
chatbot, to inspiring an immersive virtual reality.
Jonathan Foster, manager for Cortana’s editorial
team at Microsoft, heads a team of 22 writers around the world who help
give Cortana, Microsoft’s personal assistant, a consistent voice. Foster
has worked as a film and TV screenwriter in Hollywood (and continues to
write screenplays on the side), but he says he’s fascinated by the
immersive challenge of writing for tech.
He and his team have a detailed set of principles
that define Cortana’s character and work to make sure the dialog
reflects her voice. “She isn’t a chatty teenager, she’s a professional
assistant,” he says. And so Cortana is positive without being naïve or
chipper, and steers clear of dark humor.
“The nuance of what a writer can do sometimes
looks a lot easier than it actually is,” says Foster. “Conversation
seems simple because we do it every day but when you have to write it in
a logical way that doesn’t feel broken, it takes a new kind of
expertise that’s just burgeoning.”
Foster’s writers include poets, playwrights,
novelists, and the author of children’s books. They don’t try to
convince users that Cortana is human, and in fact make very clear that
she’s artificial. When it comes to difficult and divisive questions,
such as the election, Foster’s team avoids alienating users and has
Cortana instead suggest that such topics are best left for human
discussion.
In other areas, Cortana has firm views. Foster says his team changed its position on Cortana’s favorite film, for example.
“We used to do a more pervasive ‘I don’t have an
opinion about that.’ But when we saw people were asking, we realized
they really want to know what her favorite movie is,” he says. And so
the team picked Star Trek, which aligns with her science fiction personality.
Writing for tech companies can be more involved
than composing a script for a chatbot. Nathan Phillips, playwright and
co-founder of a creative agency in
New York, has worked for Intel and as a collaborator on the Google
Creative Lab, among other tech projects. His projects include a mixed reality experience for Intel,
where fish (including turtle that measured time and a whale that lit up
when it found the strongest wifi signal) would eat the 3G and wifi
waves that surround us, making them visible as they consumed them. He’s
also worked on an interactive billboard, and an interactive documentary that creates a film about the viewer based on responses to questions.
Though Phillips understands tech fairly well, he
refuses to talk about it when building the projects. “There has to be
someone who adamantly refuses to talk about how it works but instead
talks about what it is,’ he says.
The biggest difference in writing for VR rather
than a play, for example, is that the writer is making the user the
protagonist rather than trying to show the actions of the protagonist.
Otherwise, Phillips believes the central concept is the most important
element, and it’s just a matter of how it’s expressed.
“There’s no such thing as a VR idea or a book
idea,” he says. “There’s an idea that requires you use VR to convey it,
or idea that requires you have a book to convey it. Think about how many
incredible stories have been lost because someone was like ‘I write
books.’ When you stop focusing on how it works and start focusing on
what it is, you can push into a realm of idea-focused innovation.”
Both Phillips and Foster note that writing for
tech can have a significant impact. Users have an emotional response
when they talk to AI, says Foster. Writers are shaping the layer
technological information that exists everywhere and is largely
invisible. Philips says messaging applications such as WhatsApp will get
smarter, will know more about you and how to respond.
“As a writer, that’s something that is and will
be very much part of my job,” he says. “Figuring out what those voices
are, what type of personality they have, should they feel like
machines.” Writers will also have to help users feel comfortable using
this technology, and give them agency as they move “from VR to AR to MR
to talking to a human or an enhanced human.”
Storytelling have existed for millennia, says
Phillips, but thanks partly to such phenomena as reality TV, the film
equipment inside our phones, and the rise of virtual reality, the line
between fiction and reality is blurring.
“If you get rid of the writer, all you have is
the technology,” he says. “You have no one taking advantage of the fact
that reality is over.”
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