LaMDA was not designed as a writing tool. LaMDA was explicitly trained to respond safely and sensibly to whomever it’s engaging with.

LaMDA's safety features could also be limiting: Michelle Taransky found that "the software seemed very reluctant to generate people doing mean things". Models that generate toxic content are highly undesirable, but a literary world where no character is ever mean is unlikely to be interesting.

language models are incredible "yes, and" machines, allowing writers to quickly explore seemingly unlimited variations on their ideas.

For instance, if the user selects a phrase, a button to "Rewrite this phrase" is revealed along with a text input in which the user can describe how they would like the phrase to be rewritten. The user might type "to be funnier" or "to be more melancholy", and the Wordcraft application uses LaMDA and in-context learning to perform the task.

The application is powered by LaMDA, one of the latest generation of large language models. At its core, LaMDA is a simple machine — it's trained to predict the most likely next word given a textual prompt. But because the model is so large and has been trained on a massive amount of text, it's able to learn higher-level concepts.

dsDNA substrate is best for insertions or deletions greater than approximately 20 nucleotides, while ssDNA substrate is best for point mutations or changes of only a few base pairs.