A four-year-old DeepMind research project known as Wordcraft has resurfaced on Bluesky, sparking intense controversy as the 13 participating authors face boycott calls and name-and-shame lists. According to Engadget and Shopifreaks, the 2022 workshop utilized a text editor powered by LaMDA—the precursor to Gemini—prompting fierce criticism from writers labeling the cohort as participants in a plagiarism machine.
The Anatomy of the 2022 DeepMind Wordcraft Initiative
Back in the spring of 2022, Google approached a select group of professional writers, including award-winning science fiction authors. The initiative, structured as a DeepMind study, gave participants non-disclosure agreements and an eight-week window to produce a single short story using a specialized text editor.
Under the hood, that editor relied on LaMDA, Google’s early large language model architecture designed for conversational applications.
From Digital Experiment to Social Media Backlash
Lachance criticized the group as “clowns” who helped legitimize a text-generation tool built on massive corpuses of training data. The resulting digital fallout quickly stamped the participants with the “Shameful 13” moniker, dragging prominent names like Ken Liu and Robin Sloan into the crosshairs of online activists.
Participant Defense and the Illusion of Informed Consent
Author Eugenia Triantafyllou addressed the backlash by stating that the project was presented purely as a study of a brand-new writing tool, adding that she had no idea the underlying architecture drew on copyrighted books.
At least one participating author opted out of utilizing the AI-generated output entirely, producing their story without accepting suggestions from the LaMDA-backed editor.
The 30-Second Verdict
- The Impact: 13 participating authors, including Ken Liu and Robin Sloan, face online boycott threats and “Shameful 13” lists.
- The Core Conflict: Participants argue they viewed it as a benign writing tool study under NDA, while critics claim the project legitimized training data exploitation.
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