Google’s Wordcraft Writers Workshop, a 2022 DeepMind study, has left the 13 authors who took part facing boycott threats and name-and-shame lists on Bluesky, according to Engadget. Participants signed NDAs and got eight weeks each to produce one short story using a text editor that ran on LaMDA, the model that later became the basis for Gemini, and at least one of them used none of what it generated. Author Lily Lachance surfaced the old project page on August 6 in a since-deleted post calling the group clowns who helped legitimize a plagiarism machine, and the “Shameful 13” tag stuck, catching Ken Liu and Robin Sloan among others. Eugenia Triantafyllou said it was presented to her as a study of a new writing tool and that she had no idea it drew on copyrighted books.
