Japanese AI Program Wrote a Short Novel, Almost Won a Literary Prize (digitaltrends.com) 40
An anonymous reader cites a Digital Trends article: A Japanese AI program has co-authored a short-form novel that passed the first round of screening for a national literary prize. The robot-written novel didn't win the competition's final prize, but who's to say it won't improve in its next attempt? The novel is actually called The Day A Computer Writes A Novel, or "Konpyuta ga shosetsu wo kaku hi" in Japanese. The meta-narrative wasn't enough to win first prize at the third Nikkei Hoshi Shinichi Literary Award ceremony, but it did come close. Officially, the novel was written by a very human team that led the AI program's development. Hitoshi Matsubara and his team at Future University Hakodate in Japan selected words and sentences, and set parameters for construction before letting the AI "write" the novel autonomously.
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Re:This would be more reasonable if... (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't believe you've actually read 'Finnegan's Wake'. Nobody can finish that. Even the authors of the 'Cliff's Notes' only read other summaries.
Professors that make a living off it, don't actually read it. Bluffing, every one.
I have seen it excepted for good effect in a book on lunatics. Retired 'loony bin attendants' might have a chance at finishing it, but I doubt any of them miss it that much. Can you picture nurse Ratchet putting down her drink to read the same kind of BS she had to deal with for 30 years?
I think the trick to reading it is to do it the same way it was written: Blackout drunk, not putting down long term memory. Or alternatively, in 60 second bites starting on random pages, before throwing the book at the wall...separated by 20 years.
The Japanese do continue to be massively over represented in the world's collection of WTF?
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I don't believe you've actually read 'Finnegan's Wake'. Nobody can finish that. Even the authors of the 'Cliff's Notes' only read other summaries.
Even James Joyce admitted he never read it, calling it a "load of bollocks".
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After which he wrote Ullyses to er, drive the point home?
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With his time machine?
Joyce was deep in the bottle by the time he dictated 'Finnigan's Wake' from a stupor. I wasn't kidding about reading it blackout drunk.
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Damn, forgot about the timing.
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After which he wrote Ullyses to er, drive the point home?
You'd have to ask him, I never read Ullyses.
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People who have read it completely have told me it is an excellent book :) But very few have read it completely
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People who have read it completely have told me it is an excellent book :) But very few have read it completely
I confess I pulled a copy off the shelf once, but two of the librarians came over and threatened to beat my ass "for my own good".
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Of course no one can finish it, the text is circular. The book's first sentence is the end of the start of the last sentence. It's an endless logic loop Joyce created to trap other authors, preventing them for writing their own novels, and to dominate the high stakes game of fine literature publishing.
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I know someone who read Finnegan's wake. When he comes out of the coma I'll ask him how it was.
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"My computer wrote that."
No, it was the neonazi teen girl AI from a few articles above.
The AI writes the novel "autonomously" (Score:3)
Hitoshi Matsubara and his team at Future University Hakodate in Japan selected words and sentences, and set parameters for construction before letting the AI "write" the novel autonomously
So, basically the AI was given the sentences and was parameterized to arrange them. I'd need more to be amazed (especially coming from Japan)
Write or compose? (Score:2)
Hitoshi Matsubara and his team at Future University Hakodate in Japan selected words and sentences, and set parameters for construction before letting the AI "write" the novel autonomously
So the researchers wrote the actual words, then programmed the AI to put the words and sentences together. So basically it solved a puzzle, albeit one with words instead of images. Writing implies creating some sort of narrative or story rather than plugging in already written phrases to see what fits best.
Almost won a literary prize (Score:2)
And AI written papers get published... (Score:2)
AI-written "scientific" papers have been published too, but that doesn't mean that they are any good. Every year there is some story about how some new AI has autonomously done some amazing feat of natural-language something, and the stories laud that is has, or is just about to pass the Turing test, and yet under closer scrutiny it is inevitably something little advanced from ELIZA [wikipedia.org] (linked for the younger crowd). Just look at Microsoft's latest bungle.
This will turn out to be either A) more an indictment
Not terribly surprising (Score:3)
This doesn't seem all that out there given the advances in lexical analysis and natural language processing. Heck, Grammatik was better at constructing an English sentence in 1992 than most middle school students (and even many high school students).
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Yes, I think the day of computer-generated best-sellers will come sooner than most people think. Train your network on the whole corpus of current literature, weight things according to market performance, do lots of a/b testing with the first short stuff you generate, and grow it out as you learn to optimize.
The bad news is that the market will be entirely flooded by the novel-length equivalent of "you won't BELIEVE what happened after this one weird trick..."
"Almost?" (Score:1)
Follow the chain of cited news articles, and eventually you discover that it passed the first round of screening -- out of four.
Story details..? (Score:3)
/pol/ did it (Score:2)
Intelligent design for novels! (Score:2)
This is just like intelligent design! The AI is like nature, and the human programmers are like God, setting things up and making tweaks to ensure things go right.
That’s very interesting, because as you know, most novels evolve through random mutation and natural selection.