Crowdsourcing has many benefits, but a new project from Penn State highlights one of the more interesting among them.  Researchers t the college have developed a system, known as Heteroglossia, which allows writers to tap into the crowd for story ideas.

The system is designed to allow writers to share pieces of their story, with crowd participants then assigned a fictional character in the story and tasked with coming up with plot ideas for that character.

“When you write a story as an author or novelist, at some point you get stuck,” the researchers say. “Using the role-play strategy and structure, you can get ideas that are semantically far from your current plot to help relieve writer’s block.”

Creative help

The idea is to help writers overcome hurdles in their thinking processes.  The researchers hypothesize that they could go to bed on a problem, and the crowd could propose solutions while they sleep.

“We built a system that can provide interesting ideas. Based on the literature, we know that when creators get stuck in the creative process, the inspirations or ideas that are semantically far from their current working idea will be more helpful than ideas that are nearer,” the researchers say.

Across two studies, the platform was put through its paces, with feedback then used in the design of the system.  The aim was to explore whether such role-play style approaches could help provide useful ideas for story arcs.

The system is designed to protect the intellectual property of the writers while still allowing them to solicit input from a wide range of allies.  At the moment, the system is purely powered by human workers, but the team are exploring how AI could potentially play a role in future iterations.

“I believe that the creative process is critical to human activities,” they say. “We talk about automating human labor, and people have the sense that automating the creative process is very difficult. I believe if we learn how to help creative writing or creative processes in general, we can learn more about how to build systems that can be creative.”