Can Artificial Intelligence Write a Novel?

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AI-writ­ten books are now an incom­ing real­i­ty. But can they write the next great best­seller? And, is this art?

AI is already writ­ing music, cre­at­ing pic­tures for graph­ic nov­els, and win­ning art com­pe­ti­tions, beat­ing humans. Next? Novels.

AI-Written Books

One of the first exper­i­men­tal AI-writ­ten nov­els turned up as ear­ly as 2017. Called 1 the Road, it was an exper­i­ment by Ross Good­win. It was writ­ten as he drove from New York to New Orleans. Strange­ly, Google fund­ed part of the cost of the project.

Good­win was accom­pa­nied by a lap­top-based AI hooked up to var­i­ous sen­sors, whose job it was to out­put text. At the end of the jour­ney, Good­win left the text unedit­ed. He even found a pub­lish­er – Jean Boîte Édi­tions. While he felt that the text was “chop­py” and had many typos, he want­ed to pre­serve it for future study.

The open­ing sen­tence reads, “It was 9:17 in the morn­ing, and the house was heavy.”

Sin­gu­lar­i­ty Hub’s Thomas Hornigold said that while it wasn’t a mas­ter­piece, “you might see, in the odd line, the flick­er­ing ghost of some­thing like con­scious­ness, a deep­er understanding”. 

The Atlantic’s Bri­an Mer­chant said he read the book in one go, despite there being no par­tic­u­lar plot or sto­ry arc. But he said there were “some strik­ing and mem­o­rable lines.” Lines like: “All the time the sun is wheel­ing out of a dark bright ground.”

So as we move into the meta­verse, and sto­ry­telling forms a part of this, how much of game­play or meta­verse enter­tain­ment will be writ­ten by AI? Poten­tial­ly – all of it. But are we there yet? Will AI be writ­ing all of our future books, movies, meta­verse lore, and gam­ing sto­ry­lines? And should this wor­ry us?

AI-Written Blogs

Any­one who blogs for a liv­ing or any­one who pro­duces con­tent for mar­ket­ing pur­pos­es has prob­a­bly heard of AI assis­tants. These are web­sites that promise to write your blog con­tent for you. The idea is that you enter some key phras­es and shape the direc­tion of the con­tent a bit, and voilà! You have your blog done for you.

But don’t get excit­ed, this isn’t quite the case yet. But we are def­i­nite­ly get­ting close.

As a writer, of course I would try this out. I chose Jasper.ai and paid the sub­scrip­tion, which was around $50 a month. Con­sid­er­ing I was already pay­ing for free­lance writ­ers to help me out on dif­fer­ent parts of my busi­ness, this seemed like a bar­gain. No lunch breaks, no hol­i­days, no com­plain­ing, no chal­leng­ing my ter­ri­ble ideas… it’s a dream come true!

Until it isn’t.

The first thing I will say is that these AI assis­tants can knock it out of the park. There are some things they can do real­ly well. I once asked Jasper.ai to write me an arti­cle on razor clams, with recipe ideas. The AI smashed it.

How­ev­er. I had to do a lot of shap­ing, and check­ing of “facts.” That is, some­times the AI told mas­sive lies! Also, it can’t do things like search for pic­tures and videos that lift the sto­ry and make it more inter­est­ing. So a human touch is def­i­nite­ly needed.

I worked out that using the AI meant that I out­put this par­tic­u­lar sto­ry twice as fast with the AI. Which is great! But then…

AI Drawbacks

I asked it to write me a sto­ry about the Euro­vi­sion con­test. This sto­ry was an abject fail­ure. It gave sta­tis­tics that were just bla­tant­ly untrue, like that Nor­way had fin­ished last more than any oth­er coun­try. Poor Nor­way – not sure why the AI dragged the coun­try so much. LEAVE THOSE COLD PEOPLE ALONE.

By the time I fact-checked every­thing, I may as well just have writ­ten the sto­ry from scratch. I found out lat­er that the AI works by read­ing every­thing it can on the inter­net and then dis­till­ing “facts” from that. So, if some­thing is untrue on the inter­net, it will be untrue in your story.

Over­all, I didn’t feel like it saved me time… so I can­celed my sub­scrip­tion. How­ev­er, the tan­ta­liz­ing pos­si­bil­i­ty of AI in the future is def­i­nite­ly there. I will revis­it this deci­sion in a year or so. And even bet­ter – what hap­pens when facts don’t mat­ter? Like when writ­ing a nov­el? This is where sure­ly, we as a species can take risks with AI writing.

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AI-Written Books: Novels

Imag­ine being a writer of a nov­el. You have intro­duced your hot main char­ac­ters. They have been struck by light­ning or what­ev­er they need to dis­cov­er their super­pow­ers… now what? Writ­ers’ block!

Here, the AI could help you get over a lit­er­ary wall. While AI writ­ers may not be wel­come in the writ­ing com­mu­ni­ty, this is an inter­est­ing junc­ture. What if the writer gives up at this first block, and the poten­tial­ly fan­tas­tic nov­el nev­er is born?

How­ev­er, by using AI, the writer could be new­ly inspired, giv­en a new direc­tion, and fin­ish the novel. 

Online, there is an equal amount of dis­gust and joy on this top­ic. Self-pub­lish­ing influ­encer Arielle Phoenix says, “I can see how in the wrong hands, these tools can result in an influx of ter­ri­ble qual­i­ty books flood­ing the inter­net. But to be hon­est, that’s no dif­fer­ent from the hun­dreds of thou­sands of ter­ri­ble qual­i­ty no-con­tent and low-con­tent books out there. And, the already ter­ri­ble self-pub­lished music and of course all of the videos on the weird end of YouTube that have tech­ni­cal­ly been self-pub­lished. Every­body has the abil­i­ty to cre­ate con­tent and the tools to do it. So, AI writ­ers are noth­ing new in that respect. In my hum­ble opin­ion AI writ­ing tools are no dif­fer­ent from some­thing like Gram­marly which you prob­a­bly didn’t know of, or think of, as an AI writ­ing tool.”

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AI Novels

Bjorn Schuller is an asso­ciate pro­fes­sor in machine learn­ing at Impe­r­i­al Col­lege Lon­don. He says, “What humans are great at is con­text inte­gra­tion, and lend­ing their over­all under­stand­ing of the world and what’s going on, in mak­ing an analy­sis of a situation.”

He says that with machines’ nat­ur­al lan­guage under­stand­ing, we aren’t there yet. “When they read research papers, they’re lack­ing the con­text and some­times don’t get the gist of let’s say, irony or sar­casm, or oth­er nuances which are in between the lines.”

Schuller says, how­ev­er, that these gaps are slow­ly becom­ing less of a gap. “Emo­tion­al intel­li­gence is com­ing to the fore. And, at the same time, machines can exploit big data and exploit all sorts of knowl­edge data­bas­es that a human does not have the capac­i­ty to store. So, when we think of a machine and a human, the machine can browse all of Wikipedia or sim­i­lar plat­forms. There­fore, they will have quite an advan­tage in exploit­ing more information.”

Once the AI con­quers con­ver­sa­tion­al skills, it can then learn cre­ative skills. Then we enter the realm of AI pro­duc­ing poems, short sto­ries and novels.

Schuller says after this point, the AI can come up with plots. “This is quite intrigu­ing. AI has a big advan­tage over the human author, as it can be very good at keep­ing track of the char­ac­ters that it is using it in its fiction.”

The AI remem­bers all of the poten­tial flaws that could eas­i­ly find their way into a human-writ­ten sto­ry. “The sto­ry can be checked at all lev­els by the machine per­fect­ly well.”

Schuller says that despite what you may have heard, this is still some­what in the future.

AI Nonsense

The progress… or unprogress… of AIs can be seen in this clip below. Jack Soslow pitched two AIs togeth­er in a con­ver­sa­tion. They spoke a lot of pro­found non­sense, but we can def­i­nite­ly feel the sex­u­al ten­sion between them. Is this the great romance nov­el of our times in the mak­ing? Not yet.

Today is Spaceship Day

In anoth­er exper­i­ment, a cre­ator called Austin McConnell asked an AI to write a sto­ry, and he got a dif­fer­ent AI to ani­mate it. He says, “It seems like every day I hear or see a news sto­ry about how Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence is get­ting clos­er and clos­er to becom­ing indis­tin­guish­able from human beings. And while AI has cer­tain­ly changed the face of automa­tion, it remains to be seen whether or not it can tru­ly repli­cate the cre­ative spir­it. I decid­ed to put that idea to the test. So, using an open-source AI pro­gram, I plugged in sev­er­al well-known sto­ries, like the Har­ry Pot­ter series, some Star Wars screen­plays, a few Stephen King nov­els, and even a mediocre young adult book was writ­ten years ago by yours tru­ly. After the com­put­er used those to learn how to write, I asked the sys­tem to gen­er­ate its own orig­i­nal tale.”

MCConnell says that the sto­ry is ridicu­lous. But actu­al­ly, that’s not the case. It’s def­i­nite­ly a lit­tle weird. But. Dear God, it is strange­ly compelling.

AI-Written Books: Other Experiments

In anoth­er exper­i­ment, a cre­ator made a bot watch over 400,000 hours of hor­ror movies. Then, they asked the bot to write its own hor­ror movie. The bot named the sto­ry, Mr Puz­zles Wants You to be Less Alive.

While it’s far from per­fect, it is also strange­ly compelling.

The same cre­ators also cre­at­ed a Christ­mas Movie which is unin­ten­tion­al­ly hilar­i­ous. The bot called the flick “Carol’s Christ­mas Car­ol For Car­ol, A Woman Named Carol.”

You could lit­er­al­ly fall off your seat laugh­ing watch­ing this. The cre­ators say that it is a “math­e­mat­i­cal­ly per­fect Hol­i­day film.”

While AI-writ­ten books aren’t quite there yet, we are very, very close. Again, the ques­tion needs to be asked, will authors be obso­lete? Will con­tent writ­ers be out of a job? Is an AI cre­ative? Is this art? Will it bring joy? Are AI-writ­ten books the future? Let’s watch this space, before AI does it for us.

Got some­thing to say about AI-writ­ten books or any­thing else? Write to us or join the dis­cus­sion in our Telegram chan­nel. You can also catch us on Tik Tok, Face­book, or Twit­ter.

 

Disclaimer

All the infor­ma­tion con­tained on our web­site is pub­lished in good faith and for gen­er­al infor­ma­tion pur­pos­es only. Any action the read­er takes upon the infor­ma­tion found on our web­site is strict­ly at their own risk.



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