(2018-10-23) Computer Stories Ai Is Beginning To Assist Novelists

Computer Stories: AI Is Beginning to Assist Novelists. Robin Sloan is writing his book with the help of home-brewed software that finishes his sentences with the push of a tab key.... composes by writing snippets of text, which he sends to himself as messages and then works over into longer passages.

Writers are readers, after all. “I have read some uncounted number of books and words over the years that all went into my brain and stewed together in unknown and unpredictable ways, and then certain things come out,” Sloan said. “The output can’t be anything but a function of the input.”

Many others have been experimenting with fiction that pushes in the direction of AI.

Botnik Studios used a predictive text program to generate four pages of rather wild Harry Potter fan fiction.

Sloan wanted to see for himself. He acquired from the Internet Archive a database of texts: issues of Galaxy and If, two popular science fiction magazines in the 1950s and ’60

Those original magazines were too limiting, however, full of clichés and stereotypes. So Sloan augmented the pool with what he calls “The California Corpus,” which includes the digital text of novels by John Steinbeck, Dashiell Hammett, Joan Didion, Philip K. Dick and others; Johnny Cash’s poems; Silicon Valley oral histories; old Wired mag articles; the California Department of Fish and Wildlife’s Fish Bulletin; and more. “It’s growing and changing all the time,” he said.