Automated* story generation

[aesmael]

Originally published at a denizen's entertainment. You can comment here or there.

I like writing stories. You like reading stories. Do you like my stories enough to keep reading them?

This is not intended as a personal question. The 'I' is generic, so is the you.

Automated story generation. It is an idea I first picked up from 1984, where stories were mass-produced by machines to keep the proles sedated. Since about then I've considered such story generation a plausible, likely sort of eventuality. Included it in some stories no one yet has read. I don't see why there couldn't such production of stories unless we turn out to be living in a dualist or otherwise supernatural sort of universe.

Typically I see it as a bit of a personally bleak prospect. Writers as a set of humans obsoleted by an equivalent or superior source of fiction. Today I wondered about parochialism, and maybe for some time people would prefer stories written by humans because of the sort of prejudices that lead them to say only humans can make stories worth reading, humans have creativity, humans have something ineffable that sets them apart. Maybe some would like reading the stories of those they knew or liked. I wonder in such a scenario how likely it is human authors would still develop a following.

*meaning here stories made by (nonhumans made by humans to some degree of antecedence)

Comments

[lost-angelwings.livejournal.com]

Automatically generated stories tho, sorta like using just statistics to predict baseball, would only be as good (or at least effective in terms of popularity and sales) as the number of factors and how fine those factors are, that they were taking into account. I think we alrdy have something similar to automatically generated stories in terms of generic hollywood output, or hollywood decisions, the idea that ppl behind laptops can predict what you need for a hero, what you need for a plot, etc to be popular.. but I think the thing is sometimes that stories are popular not on purpose, but b/c they find an audience for being what they are.. kinda like evolution, there's no direction, but whatever works works... and there's just so many factors.. I think if a computer and a human were both making a story towards a goal like getting a particular demographic with a particular genre, the computer would win, but I dunno if you just say "do whatever", that we still wouldn't get humans who just write to write and get an audience... I dunno if I make sense :\ I dun think it means that humans are special or it's some triumph of emotion over logic, I think just like in baseball, we just haven't broken everything down enuf yet...

[pazi-ashfeather.livejournal.com]

Well-said.

However, it seems like that's a matter of developing a finely-grained model that's accurate enough...breaking it down enough, as you put it.

And, yes -- stories are often not popular on purpose, but because they just happen to *work* given the circumstances. (How else do you explain Dan Brown? ;p)

I think you'll always get people who want to write, who write because it's inside them and they need to get it out somehow. Whether there'll be a market for popular fiction is another question altogether.

Maybe it'll become like swordsmithing -- only hobbyists, people who really have the love, and people who sell to them seem to do it anymore, but swords still get made, and you still get people who love them some swords.

But I really have no idea.

[syntaxia.livejournal.com]

Having recently come back from the conference of the Association for Computational Linguistics... There was a one presentation on automatic story generation. Automatic story generations at this point seems to be limited to extracting random sentences from a text corpus, as long as they contain some relevant terms (i.e. "dog", if you're writing about a dog), and then putting the sentences together. Question from Ed Hovy: "But what about goals, plots?" Answer from the presenter: "We're not thinking about that".

I wouldn't worry about human writers becoming unnecessary just yet.

[infinitely-late.livejournal.com]

Psst, it's me, Q, friending you for lurky-stalky purposes ^_^ Call me Fin.

Given the popularity of things like romance novels, I think the machine-generated stories would certainly have mass-market possibilities. But even if we had those, there would still be a certain following for human authors, because machines would only be able to recycle and rework previously published ideas, whereas human authors invent new ideas, or portray old ideas from new perspectives. Unless you create a machine which can generate new ideas, which leads to questions of artificial intelligence and whether it is still just a machine...

[aesmael.livejournal.com]

Perhaps this is a good day.

Was talking indeed about a machine being able to generate new ideas, so far as humans can. I couldn't say if such a thing were likely any time in the next thousand years, or probably any period of time you care to name. But since I don't see it being impossible in principle, I wonder what would happen to the existing writing industry if it did come to pass*.

*This can't be a true sentence because I wonder about how things would work which I consider impossible too. Plus there are other things to consider, like how the preceding environment would differ from our present world. The internet is young, and all that.