Get over yourselves, authors<\/em>!<\/p> One recent offender: Robin Sloan, author of the acclaimed “Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore.”<\/p> A new story<\/a> in The<\/em> New York Times <\/em>describes Sloan’s work on his follow-up book. Huddled in his “cluttered man-cave of an office,” he punches in a sentence: “The bison are gathered around the canyon.” Then he hits “tab,” spurring software he trained — with classics by John Steinbeck, Joan Didion, and others — to spit out this page-turner: “The bison are gathered around the canyon by the bare sky.”<\/p> “That’s kind of fantastic,” Sloan muses to the Times<\/em>, which seems like a bit much. “Would I have written ‘bare sky’ by myself? Maybe, maybe not.”<\/p> And now we’ll never know.<\/p> Sloan’s new novel will probably be great compared to 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.<\/p> The result is a bunch of meaningless sentences like this, strung together into an entire book:<\/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> Of course, road trip novels are insufferable even when humans write them. To paraphrase Truman Capote’s famous diss<\/a> of Jack Kerouac: “That’s not writing; that’s just machine learning.”<\/p> If you’re tired of actual full-length books, Botnik Studios used a predictive keyboard-style algorithm to churn out a new chapter<\/a> of “Harry Potter”:<\/p> 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’s hut were the disdainful shrieks of his own furniture. Magic: it was something that Harry Potter thought was very good.<\/p> 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.<\/p> READ MORE<\/strong>: Computer Stories: A.I. Is Beginning to Assist Novelists<\/a> [The New York Times<\/em>]<\/span><\/p> More on AI-generated literature: <\/strong>Artificial Intelligence Writes Bad Poems Just Like An Angsty Teen<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p> Excerpt from: Gimmick Cynic Once is unique. Twice is a trend Continue reading 24-Hour Bot Show<\/h2>
On The Algorithm<\/h2>
Fanfic Panic<\/h2>
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Novelists Have a Boring New Gimmick: Writing Dull Books With AI<\/a><\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"