How do I get LAIKA to generate writing suggestions?

On the Write page, you can create! Simply choose a brain to write with, write a sentence or paragraph of text, and then click “Write” to see what LAIKA generates for you.

The hotkey to ask for a new suggestion is Ctrl + Enter (Cmd + Return on a Mac).

You can see a short video right here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MoMjcUPNNaM

How do I alternate between suggestions?

LAIKA will generate 3 alternatives each time. You can alternate between these by clicking into the pink text and then clicking the ‘Alternate’ button.

The hotkey to tab between alternates is Alt + Enter (Alt + Enter on a Mac).

Can I swap between brains while working?

Yes! Simply click on the brain you want to use in the left-hand drop-down menu and continue your work.

I got some disturbing results while using LAIKA. Why?

• Firstly, LAIKA is built on top of a large language model called GPT-2. GPT-2 was "fed" in 2017 with tons of content from the internet - including a huge corpus of unpublished books, and also a corpus created by OpenAI called WebText, which scraped the contents of Reddit posts that have more than 3 upvotes. So, that is a lot of text! All of this text was put in at latest in 2017, so it's not still crawling the internet for food.
• When you upload text to LAIKA, we "fine tune" the huuuuuuge GPT-2 model with your writing. In essence, this massages the shape of text that will be generated to fit your unique style and contents. It makes sure that all of your writing is given a much higher weighting, so your concepts and style are vastly more likely to be used in the text suggestions. However, it's still open to the "wiring under the hood" too, as that's where the weird little serendipitous moments of "Aha!" can come from. But it’s also where the weird/bad/uncanny can come from too.
• We are very aware that this issue can arise, and we are very sorry for any distress it may cause. We are doing all we can to minimise it happening for our users, but unfortunately the nature of large language models is currently problematic in this way, and this is something that causes issues for all textual applications of AI at this moment in time.

How can I illustrate my writing inside LAIKA?

As you write within LAIKA, you can always choose to illustrate your wonderful words!

Simply click on the “Draw” button in the toolbar and select what kind of image you wish to create and then choose a style and shape to continue.