China Literature

Aug 21, 2023

Share Good news, literature writers. China Literature will soon roll out a new large language model and AI tool designed to assist your creative process in a variety of ways. “AIGC won’t replace writers. Writers will always be the protagonists.” Those were the words of Xiaonan Hou, CEO of China Literature, the online literature arm of Chinese technology giant Tencent. They were articulated by Hou during an event organized on July 19 earlier this year to unveil the industry’s first large language model (LLM) called Yuewen Miaobi, and its derivative tool Writer’s Assistant Miaobi. Hou likened the significance of AIGC, which stands for artificial intelligence-generated content to writers as the transition from manual driving to assisted driving. Writing literature is generally a time-consuming and strenuous process, involving tasks such as story development, scenario creation, and research. According to Hou, Yuewen Miaobi, through the tools it is integrated with, can assist writers in each of these areas, making their work less tedious to complete. Writer’s Assistant Miaobi is relatively easy and straightforward for writers to use. By selecting the story’s setting, gender and type of characters, appropriate tags, and writing draft descriptions in a text box, the tool can generate sets of character names, appearances, personalities, and other characteristics. Writer’s Assistant Miaobi offers a feature to provide writers with character inspiration. Screenshot of the tool generating a set of character traits based on the settings input by the writer under the left column. Image courtesy of 36Kr. The tool can also generate literary context using a similar feature. For example, in fantasy novels, the tool can generate information about treasure items, creatures, factions, among others, based on parameters provided by the writer. Even combat scenes can be described in detailed text passages solely with the tool. However, Writer’s Assistant Miaobi, like other AI generation tools, still can’t replicate one key aspect of writers: creativity. Ultimately, what they can generate will depend on the data that the model has been trained with. Online literature is also a product of long-term creation, with works generally comprising millions, if not tens of millions of words. While AIGC can aid writers in producing these works more efficiently, the overall structure of literary works, in terms of their narratives, tropes, and expressions, still require the purview of human writers to put together. RELATED ARTICLE