<h2>Gimmick Cynic</h2>
Once is unique. Twice is a trend. Three or more times starts to feel awfully gimmicky.
That&#8217;s where we stand with the ever-so-edgy novelists using artificial intelligence to spit out lazy new books. AI <a href="https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence-hype">isn&#8217;t as impressive as you think</a> — at least not yet — so the results of writing with AI are invariably underwhelming.
Get over yourselves, authors!
<h2>24-Hour Bot Show</h2>
One recent offender: Robin Sloan, author of the acclaimed &#8220;Mr. Penumbra&#8217;s 24-Hour Bookstore.&#8221;
A <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/18/technology/ai-is-beginning-to-assist-novelists.html">new story</a> in The New York Times describes Sloan&#8217;s work on his follow-up book. Huddled in his &#8220;cluttered man-cave of an office,&#8221; he punches in a sentence: &#8220;The bison are gathered around the canyon.&#8221; Then he hits &#8220;tab,&#8221; spurring software he trained — with classics by John Steinbeck, Joan Didion, and others — to spit out this page-turner: &#8220;The bison are gathered around the canyon by the bare sky.&#8221;
&#8220;That’s kind of fantastic,&#8221; Sloan muses to the Times, which seems like a bit much. &#8220;Would I have written ‘bare sky’ by myself? Maybe, maybe not.&#8221;
And now we&#8217;ll never know.
<h2>On The Algorithm</h2>
Sloan&#8217;s new novel will probably be great compared to <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/neural-net-road-trip-wrote-novel">this word salad</a>, generated by programmer Ross Goodwin. Goodwin hooked up a bunch of neural networks to a GPS, a camera, and other sensors, then took a road trip from Brooklyn to New Orleans.
The result is a bunch of meaningless sentences like this, strung together into an entire book:
The table is black to be seen, the bus crossed in a corner. A military apple breaks in. Part of a white line of stairs and a street light was standing in the street, and it was a deep parking lot.
Of course, road trip novels are insufferable even when humans write them. To paraphrase Truman Capote&#8217;s <a href="https://quoteinvestigator.com/2015/09/18/typing/">famous diss</a> of Jack Kerouac: &#8220;That’s not writing; that’s just machine learning.&#8221;
<h2>Fanfic Panic</h2>
If you&#8217;re tired of actual full-length books, Botnik Studios used a predictive keyboard-style algorithm to <a href="http://botnik.org/content/harry-potter.html">churn out a new chapter</a> of &#8220;Harry Potter&#8221;:
The Castle grounds snarled with a wave of magically magnified wind. The sky outside was a great black ceiling, which was full of blood. The only sounds drifting from Hagrid&#8217;s hut were the disdainful shrieks of his own furniture. Magic: it was something that Harry Potter thought was very good.
Heck, it might not be J.K. Rowling, but we have to admit this attempt at writing with AI at least has a certain charm.
READ MORE: <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/18/technology/ai-is-beginning-to-assist-novelists.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Computer Stories: A.I. Is Beginning to Assist Novelists</a> [The New York Times]
More on AI-generated literature: <a href="https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence-bad-poems">Artificial Intelligence Writes Bad Poems Just Like An Angsty Teen</a>

Maybe we generated this status with AI. Are we visionaries, too?!

Novelists have a boring new gimmick: writing dull books with AI

Dept. of Literature

Artificial intelligence really isn't that great yet, so we're super over these ever-so-edgy novelists who are writing with AI.

Novelists Have a Boring New Gimmick: Writing Dull Books With AI

Get over yourselves, authors!

<h2>NOVEL NET</h2>
Have you ever dreamed of leaving it all behind, setting out on that cross-country road trip, and coming back with the manuscript you always swore you’d write? Too late. Now robots are even coming after your great American novel.
A bunch of interconnected neural networks wrote a novel called “<a href="https://www.jean-boite.fr/product/1-the-road-by-an-artificial-neural">1 the Road</a>” during a road trip from Brooklyn to New Orleans. Programmer Ross Goodwin built the system to <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TqsW0PMd8R0">churn out bursts of prose</a> based on inputs including GPS coordinates, Foursquare data, and a camera with image recognition software.
There&#8217;s not much in the way of a story in the novel — though to be fair, that&#8217;s seldom stopped mediocre human novelists. And what it lacks in a compelling narrative it makes up for by demonstrating the experimental, artsy potential of AI-generated text.
<h2>AI AUTHOR</h2>
While The Atlantic <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/10/automated-on-the-road/571345/">compared</a> the AI to Jack Kerouac and guessed at hidden meanings in the text, it’s important to remember that we&#8217;re talking about nonsense passages like:
<blockquote>The table is black to be seen, the bus crossed in a corner. A military apple breaks in. Part of a white line of stairs and a street light was standing in the street, and it was a deep parking lot.</blockquote>
If you&#8217;re having a hard time gleaning the deep, hidden meaning from that excerpt, it&#8217;s likely because there isn&#8217;t one.
<h2>ON THE NODE</h2>
Goodwin <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/10/automated-on-the-road/571345/">trained his neural nets</a> with databases of poetry and literature. So while &#8220;1 the Road&#8221; might seem artsy compared to Siri or Alexa, that&#8217;s only because the AI that produced it had been forced to read more lyrical, provocative language than a typical chatbot.
And to say that &#8220;artificial intelligence wrote a novel&#8221; is a bit of a stretch, given than doing so usually involves crafting coherent sentences and stringing thoughts together, all things that artificial intelligence isn&#8217;t yet creative enough to do.
A page turner, this is not.
READ MORE: <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/10/automated-on-the-road/571345/">When an AI Goes Full Jack Kerouac</a> [The Atlantic]
More on AI-generated literature: <a href="https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence-bad-poems">Artificial Intelligence Writes Bad Poems Just Like An Angsty Teen</a>

An AI took a road trip and wrote a terrible novel about it

Great AI-Merican Novel

A series of neural nets wrote a novel based on what it saw and heard while being driven around the country. It's, uh, interesting.

An AI Took a Road Trip and Wrote a Terrible Novel About It

If “that guy in your MFA” were a robot.

An up-and-coming author you probably didn’t expect.

An advanced language generation platform is able to turn numbers into a coherent story.

An AI may write your next favorite novel

Network servers

Artificial Intelligence

Quill, an advanced language generation platform created by Narrative Science, is able to use numbers to write as well as a human could.

An AI May Write Your Next Favorite Novel

<h5>Coming Out of Beta</h5>
When dealing with large amounts of data, Automated Insights’ Wordsmith technology allows writers to focus on being creative by using AI to auto-generate the first version of their story for them. The technology has already been used by the Associated Press and Yahoo! to auto-generate data heavy articles. Now, users can sign up to access the beta for the <a href="http://automatedinsights.com/" target="_blank">public version of Wordsmith</a>, with an official release planned on January.
<h5>From Spreadsheets to Prose</h5>
Wordsmith is a platform that allows writers to upload CSV files of large data sets. It then generates natural language reports based on that data. Wordsmith follows a predetermined template set by the user and allows the creation of branching paths. Phrases used can be randomized for added variety.
Ultimately, the Wordsmith platform another tool to help writers. Automated Insights CEO Robbie Allen says, &#8220;The writing process has largely been untouched. The way that you write now is not much different than how you did it 30 years ago.&#8221;

Wordsmith is essentially an AI that can auto generate articles and natural language reports from large data sets

/Writing

Dept. of Literature

Novelists Have a Boring New Gimmick: Writing Dull Books With AI

Great AI-Merican Novel

An AI Took a Road Trip and Wrote a Terrible Novel About It

Artificial Intelligence

An AI May Write Your Next Favorite Novel

Artificial Intelligence

The Robot Journalist Called Wordsmith Will Soon Be Available to All

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