{"id":296811,"date":"2018-10-04T04:44:49","date_gmt":"2018-10-04T08:44:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/uncategorized\/an-ai-took-a-road-trip-and-wrote-a-terrible-novel-about-it.php"},"modified":"2018-10-04T04:44:49","modified_gmt":"2018-10-04T08:44:49","slug":"an-ai-took-a-road-trip-and-wrote-a-terrible-novel-about-it","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/futurism\/an-ai-took-a-road-trip-and-wrote-a-terrible-novel-about-it.php","title":{"rendered":"An AI Took a Road Trip and Wrote a Terrible Novel About It"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><\/p><h2>NOVEL NET<\/h2><p>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&rsquo;d write? Too late. Now robots are even coming after your&nbsp;great American novel.<\/p><p>A bunch of interconnected neural networks wrote a novel called &ldquo;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.jean-boite.fr\/product\/1-the-road-by-an-artificial-neural\">1 the Road<\/a>&rdquo;&nbsp;during a road trip&nbsp;from Brooklyn to New Orleans. Programmer Ross Goodwin built the system to&nbsp;<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.<\/p><p>There&rsquo;s not much in the way of a story in the novel&nbsp;&mdash; though to be fair, that&rsquo;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.<\/p><h2><strong>AI AUTHOR<\/strong><\/h2><p>While&nbsp;<em>The<\/em>&nbsp;<em>Atlantic<\/em>&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.theatlantic.com\/technology\/archive\/2018\/10\/automated-on-the-road\/571345\/\">compared<\/a>&nbsp;the AI to Jack Kerouac and guessed at hidden meanings in the text, it&rsquo;s important to remember that we&rsquo;re talking about nonsense passages like:<\/p><blockquote><p>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.<\/p><\/blockquote><p>If you&rsquo;re having a hard time gleaning the deep, hidden meaning from that excerpt, it&rsquo;s likely because there isn&rsquo;t one.<\/p><h2>ON THE NODE<\/h2><p>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 &ldquo;1 the Road&rdquo; might seem artsy compared to Siri or Alexa, that&rsquo;s only because the AI that produced it had been forced to read more lyrical, provocative language than a typical chatbot.<\/p><p>And to say that &ldquo;artificial intelligence wrote a novel&rdquo; 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&rsquo;t yet&nbsp;creative enough to do.<\/p><p>A page turner, this is not.<\/p><p><strong>READ MORE<\/strong>: <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]<\/p><p><strong><em>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><\/em><\/strong><\/p><p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/wp-assets.futurism.com\/2018\/10\/AI-novel-2-1200x630.png\" style=\"padding-left:10px; padding-right: 10px;\"><\/p><p>Read the original here:<br><a target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow\" href=\"https:\/\/futurism.com\/neural-net-road-trip-wrote-novel\" title=\"An AI Took a Road Trip and Wrote a Terrible Novel About It\">An AI Took a Road Trip and Wrote a Terrible Novel About It<\/a><\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p> NOVEL NET 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\u2019d write? Too late <a href=\"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/futurism\/an-ai-took-a-road-trip-and-wrote-a-terrible-novel-about-it.php\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"limit_modified_date":"","last_modified_date":"","_lmt_disableupdate":"","_lmt_disable":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-296811","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-futurism"],"modified_by":null,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/296811"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=296811"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/296811\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=296811"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=296811"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=296811"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}