Introducing Dramatron, the Open-Source Co-Creation Tool Powered by GPT-3
Deepmind announcing public access to Dramatron
Important note: Dramatron (mentioned here recently) is in an early stage of development — the public test has been closed for now.
Dramatron is a work-in-progress, open-source co-creation system for writers of screenplays and theatre plays. It uses GPT-3 under the hood to provide writers with content based on narrative categories to help them edit and rewrite. And it became publicly accessible today! 🚀
What’s exciting about this project is that during the development phase, the Dramatron team had conversations with industry professionals and evaluated the actual use of an AI tool in screenwriting and playwriting.
Their reflections can be found in their pre-print “Co-Writing Screenplays and Theatre Scripts with Language Models: An Evaluation by Industry Professionals”. Most interestingly:
[…] playwrights reflected that they “wouldn’t use [Dramatron] to write a full play,” and that Dramatron’s output can be “formulaic.” Rather, they would use Dramatron for “world building,” for exploring alternative stories by changing characters or plot elements, and for creative idea generation.
That means if you just enter a logline (especially one without basic narrative elements) and hit “generate”, you won’t get any useful results:
On the other hand, if you feed Dramatron a logline that sort of works, and edit the output (I beefed up the character description of James and Father Thomas with an additional character, Ben), you get pretty useful first drafts of possible scenes, and plot points, as well as descriptions of scene settings.
At the time of writing, the optional scene writing was either not good enough or broke due to code updates or other bugs. So it remains to be seen how good Dramatron can become after it has been tested by a number of writers.
What Dramatron wants to be and what it can’t be
Dramatron focuses on being an AI co-writing system for working with human writers and is not designed to magically create full-length scripts itself. In addition, the story generation structure used by Dramatron is not necessarily everybody’s choice. At Dramatron the team seems aware of the tool’s current shortcomings but is committed to evolving it to meet the needs of writers.
With an OpenAI API key, you can access Dramatron’s web interface here: https://deepmind.github.io/dramatron/
Or use it via Colab here: https://colab.research.google.com/github/deepmind/dramatron/blob/main/colab/dramatron.ipynb
More interesting stuff for writers:
