Machine-Written Books

Computer science student here, yep it'll happen.

Machines already write sports reports, and i am happy

There are print-on-demand "books" for sale on amazon that are cobbled together from random wikipedia articles and stuff. I think the "authors" use a computer program to trawl for content.

It's a scam.

>>9576983
I studied software development and english literature, and 'natural language generation' of poetry and fiction is one of my interests.

In history, there have been a lot of explicit procedural literary techniques dating back to movements like dadaism, surrealism, the Beats, OuLiPo, and various others. Of course, there was and is also work going on using computers.

There is a lot of scattered work and narrow projects in the area. Which I guess sums up the problem: brittleness. In other words, it is easy to create a system which completes a particular writing task (like writing sports articles, or using a fairly rigid methodology to write poems or fictional works), but as soon as you try to generalise beyond the original task, you find that it cannot scale up.

A lot of current writing algorithms/AI is based on things like templates, and probabilistic models trained on fairly clear relationships between data and text (sports/finance/etc). You can train a system to understand a relationship which is as straightforward as sports teams winning or losing, sports players scoring points, and changes in stock prices and so on.

However!

The issue with teaching computers to write books is that it is a much more complex task. Training a system to write what books communicate (worlds, characters, places, plots, themes, references, human relationships, the human condition, etc) requires that you model them explicitly in data structures (or implicitly as some kind of probablistic model trained on other texts - but then the problem is that the system needs to be able to read and model the right kinds of features from those training texts to reproduce something similar).

In other words (or at least, this is my argument), to be able to teach a computer to write books, it probably needs to be able to read them first - at least approximately enough that the newly generated texts make sense and carry a lot of the expected features of books. Perhaps this is possible in a very 'formalist' way (looking for literary structures, forms, inherent features: chapters, characters, places, relationships, plots, ...). But I think it would remain difficult to 'scale up' even with the greatest of efforts.

>>9577058
I'm going to do just that, but w/ 4chan posts, just to see what happens.

>>9577088
I hope all that makes sense. But just to go back and actually answer your questions:

>I can't go into detail as to why an autoritarian gov't needs such a machine but it got me thinking; could one day machines (via A.I. or procedural generation) write books?
Yes.

>And if so, elegantly enough that the untrained reader couldn't tell it apart from one written by humans?
I think yes. But I think there are many more low hanging fruit before generated books become widespread.

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Automatic_Grammatizator

>>9576983

By definition, you can't program creativity. Therefore AI can't write anything original, i.e. art.

They can certainly write "books", but only stale rehashes of whatever source material they're given to work with.

I study computer science. Yes it will happen, and will put most authors out of business. I wager we'll no longer even read shakespeare and co, we gonna science the shit out of literature.

>>9577815
>I study computer science.
Not hard enough, apparently.
>>9577805

>>9576983

It would take more effort to instruct a machine to write one good novel than it would take to simply write one. Creativity happens at the level of self-transcendence.

>>9577805
>art is original

Machines will truly write nor create art, because they will never experience emotion. They may produce the most magnificent and beautiful work of art anyone has ever laid eyes upon, but it will be meaningless and hollow, and will therefore never be art.

Even when the machines take over, they won't outdo us at our best game.

>>9578107
>will never experience emotion

Essentially emotions are a specific pattern in your brain's neural network, and we can already make quite sophisticated artificial neural networks so I see no reason why they couldn't eventually experience emotions.

>>9578107
>art is emotion

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Cicero on why machines will never compete with humans in any art:

>"No other animal feels the beauty, elegance, symmetry, of the things that he sees; while by nature and reason, man, transferring these qualities from the eyes to the mind, considers that much more, even, are beauty, consistency, and order to be preserved in purposes and acts, and takes heed that he do nothing indecorous or effeminate, and still more, that in all his thoughts and deeds he neither do nor think anything lascivious. From these elements the right, which is the object of our inquiry, is composed and created; and this, even if it be not ennobled in title, yet is honorable, and even if no one praise it, we truly pronounce it in its very nature worthy of all praise." - De Officiis

Plots, scenes and sentences within scenes generally happen in mathematically predictable ways, especially in simple things like erotica and fairytales. There's no reason why a generic story couldn't be generated by an algorithm in such a way that it's indistinguishable from how a human might have put it. There are already browser-based fairy-tale generators which use the Aarne-Thompson index and/or the work of Propp to create stories.

it's already happening, even though it ends up being comedic. this is a short film where the script was written by AI

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LY7x2Ihqjmc

>>9576983
They won't be marketable for a long time, but machines can already write grammatically-correct books easily, and coherent paragraphs with lots of training. Really all we need is a massive dataset.

>>9577805
Google "Emily Howell."

Books mean nothing without authorial intent. Sorry pomos

>>9578207
humans are machines

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computer generated poetry is already a thing.

>>9578107
>>9578140

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affective_computing

>>9576983

The only "issue" which is not an actual issue if you have no moral standpoint against it, is that some eventual "machine art" might quite literally just go over our heads. Think of how most books and specially poetry is filled with the human mind and body, and direct references to coming in contact with the world through our mind and body.

A machine would not really care about any of this, in spite of being able to spite coherent sentences (some machines already are) about it. If they actually "decided" or "learned" to come up with their own patterns, it might not be remotely similar to ours, let alone be intelligible to us. Question is, would still be a book/story in our definition?

Also, consider how immense a database would have, to be available for a machine to come up with their own written stories. It's hard to even come up with a number really, but I suppose any AI as we conceive them today would have to "eat" many books AND be able to actually do semantics in order to begin writing by itself (that is, writing something that has little to do and is only derivative of the previously obtained content).

>>9577805
you're a dumb
human creativity is also a "stale rehash" then. our source material is our experiences within systems that define our function.
how about a program that's a perfect recreation of a human mind, do you think that can be "creative"?

>>9578662

>spite = spit, lmao tse tung

>>9578662
>A machine would not really care about any of this
Whether or not the computer did a good job would be based on what humans accept as 'a good job' so your point is invalid.

I believe they already have a rudimentary AI system that can write short stories if it has been given pre-set parameters. Enter in the genre, setting, the target audience and (most importantly) products and companies (for advertising reasons). I like to read creepypastas as light reading before bed if Im in a spook-able mood. If I can't find any good ones, I will check out r/nosleep occasionally. I have been going there for around 6 years on and off. Recently, almost all stories seem to be lacking the human component in the writing. They also are all chocked full of pop-culture references, stores, brands, specific food items, cars (down to year of model and of course the make).

The stories I suspect of this are usually written in a halting, concise manner, with descriptions almost in point form. Reminds me VERY much of Hemingway's writing style, without the human feel to it. Just my too-sense.

>>9580092
if I am correct on this, I hope the AI is only used to write blockbuster movie scripts. Big budget movies already feel lifeless and cold, books shouldn't go that route. However it is a natural progression of technology for humans to create AI to write stories for our entertainment.
Kind of like "mirror mirror on the wall, who's the fairest of them all?" The lady is using a non-human object AI-esque system to deliver compliments. Obviously said compliments are hollow and meaningless, but to a vain witch they are enjoyable. Picture a lonely NEET entering in parameters into the AI so it can create a personalized story with him as the central character, who gets lots of babes. Yes, its not real, human work but he may still find it enjoyable to read.
The AI could turn everyone into an "author" sort of like how graphic design computer programs can turn anyone into an "artist" or music making computer programs can turn anyone into a "musician"

>>9576983
OP the book states how all the porno novels are nearly identical. The machine apparently just has a bunch of prewritten lines and chooses them. I don't remember if they make porn films though.

>>9580533
I am currently reading it and yes they do make pornos for the 'proles' primarily.

Why one would program a machine to write a book? Writing is an inherently human activity. It's like teaching a machine to get bored or to shit

>wasting time and resources teaching a machine to write instead of just writing

Fuck this worthless civilization.

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>>9581552
it's called progress and scientific curiosity, grandpa. you'll still be lonely on your porch looking at the stars while me and my generation are plugged into the global network. i feel sorry for you.

>>9578146
It literally is. All true art is pure emotion in physical form. Similar to what >>9578207 says.

>>9576983
Yes, but it'll be a long time. Right now we have mimicry and visual recognition learning AI but real understanding of everything from verbs to emotions is needed to write or even communicate properly

>>9582507
Actually I take that back. We're on the cusp of becoming a race of 200+ IQ geniuses through eugenics and gene editing, and that's just the next 30-100 years, who knows where it goes from there. AI can't compete with that

>>9582542
>AI can't compete with that
Yes it can. AI can in theory evolve itself far faster than we ever could.

>>9582553
In theory both AI and the human brain can keep evolving indefinitely, and AI would have to be way way ahead in the race to do the brain's job of language and emotion better than the brain itself

>>9576983
>gov't
why do people do this

>>9582581
People need time to grow up so we can see how well the eugenics or gene editing have worked. An AI can simply replicate itself in the time it takes to copy data over, see how well that works then do it again with no loss of resources. It can make any number of varied copies of itself almost instantly in any number of sandbox environments to see which changes work best then turn up the clock speed and see how they fare.

>>9583885
Nah, they've basically identified all the "g-loaded" genes already. Ubermensch soon