Seed Bank, Co-op, Stoop Swap: Metaphors for Governing Language Model Data for Creative Writing
For researchers and practitioners in human-AI interaction and creative writing, this work provides a qualitative, participatory perspective on language model governance, though it is exploratory and does not present quantitative results.
The paper explores how creative writers envision governing language models through metaphor, reporting on workshops with over 100 writers who generated 200+ metaphors. Key themes include consent, community boundaries, contributor recognition, and scale trade-offs, pointing toward smaller, open models that encode group values.
How might we govern a language model run for and by creative writers? While generative AI use is on the rise, many language models are created and owned in ways that limit writers' consent, participation, and control. We report on four workshops where over one hundred creative writers came up with and analyzed metaphors for language model governance, resulting in over two hundred metaphors: objects, places, processes, groups, and infrastructure that support reasoning about language model governance. What if a language model was like a community garden? Or a seed bank? Or the bathroom in a dive bar? We report on four themes: (1) the importance of consent, (2) how to define community boundaries, (3) ways to give contributor recognition, and (4) trade-offs in scale of language models. These metaphors point towards smaller, open models that encode group values. We discuss concrete ways to make community language models a reality.