> Simpler question: with a sufficiently-smart story generator, could you enjoy it if you knew it was procedurally generated? I feel that I couldn't. I feel lik

> Simpler question: with a sufficiently-smart story generator, could you enjoy it if you knew it was procedurally generated? I feel that I couldn't. I feel like this might commit you to having some amount of conflict with "death of the author"? If one cares that the writing was written by a person, and not just transcribed by a person, but composed by a person, it seems to me like one probably cares that the writing was done with an intent. I don't see a reason that one would care about whether the writing was made with an intent, in a way that plays a role in whether one enjoys it, but not care at all about what that intent was. So, I would expect that anyone who couldn't, or at least most people who couldn't, enjoy a work of fiction if they knew it was procedurally generated, probably would care about the intent of the author in writing what they are reading. I also generally care about that, but I think I sometimes enjoy procedurally generated works, though this might be largely due to my knowing about the intent behind the writing of the code that produced the procedurally generated content, which includes substantial bits of literal text to include in the output, so..