4 ms·

Fiction, at least, has been well-studied and broken into defined components. All stories follow a predictable arc: exposition, conflict, climax, conclusion, an

by lupatus 15y ago

Fiction, at least, has been well-studied and broken into defined components. All stories follow a predictable arc: exposition, conflict, climax, conclusion, and denouement [1]. Use well-tested plot devices to move through the story arc [2]. Define a skeleton framework of what kind of plot devices go where in the story. Have a database of scene location descriptions. Have a database of character stereotypes. Make your algorithm mix-and-match them to fill-in the story skeleton. Seen this way, A New Hope and Raiders of the Lost Ark are kind of similar. Plot: Rescue the princess/my father Hero: young/grizzled adventurer Plucky sidekick: loyal robots/Professor Ally: Semi-sleazy smuggler Scene: Fascist Empire spaceship/Nazi North Africa Bad guys: Stormtroopers/Nazis Main villain: black-clothed mystical bad Jedi/Archeologist Heck, using this format, you could make your own OWS drama: Plot: Rescue my bankrupt mother Hero: idealistic hippy Plucky sidekick: loyal golden retreiver Ally: Semi-sleazy drug dealer Scene: Urban city streets Bad guys: city police Main villain: black-suited bad finance executive I would call it "Wall Street Raiders" or "Wall Street: A New Hope". Yes, FWIW, I've been contemplating coding just such a story-generating engine. Like Mad Libs on steroids. [1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dramatic_structure http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dramatic_structure [2]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plot_device http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plot_device

aperrien 15y ago
This sounds really interesting. If you do this, can you post your progress and results?
- lupatus 15y ago
  Sure. I've been thinking of taking a stab at Romance novels first because they tend to be very formulaic and are a surprisingly profitable fiction niche.
  - IsaacL 15y ago
    I think Mills and Boons titles are probably generated by a very simple grammar: The [Nationality] [High-powered Profession]'s [Asdjective for Sexy] [Synonym for Lover]. Eg The Turkish Millionaire's Sultry Mistress, The North Korean Cadre's Sleazy Hooker, etc. But I think your project could be AI-hard - to write a compelling story you'd need to have a virtual world with virtual characters with virtual psychologies. You'd need to be able to model complicated stuff like "Romeo knows Juliet thinks he is already dead", and simple stuff like "If Romeo is under Juliet's balcony, he can't see her until he climbs up". Interesting project though.
    - lupatus 15y ago
      Good point. I wonder if you could specify pre-/post-requirements for plot devices to make the scenarios you described easier to handle.
akg_67 15y ago
Could this be done in reverse by software? Instead of story-generating engine, automated identification of the plot line, character profile. Basically automatically building the database you mentioned by feeding already written fiction. I think a larger business may be in building such a repository. Story generating engine will commoditize fiction creation.
- lupatus 15y ago
  I think that there are far fewer plot devices, character stereotypes, and background scenes for fiction than you expect. There are enough though to have, at least, 100s of millions of possible combinations. And those combinations are where the "creative" novelty of fiction novels arises. For example, let us suppose that at the end of Braveheart, instead of getting disemboweled, Optimus Prime flys down out of the sky, kills the executioner, saves Mel Gibson, and lays waste to the English forces; thus allowing Mel Gibson to have his revenge and to ride off into the sunset with the English queen. Creative? Sure. Formulaic? Yes! I think that a few Google searches would reveal lists of the majority of the different story components
- jacques_chester 15y ago
  I wrote a project proposal for this (though I went with a different project) and there's some existing work. Email me and I'll send it to you.
jonnathanson 15y ago
Sure, all stories rely on formulas. That's nothing shocking or new. Even the ancient Greeks wrote about how all stories break down into a handful of basic formulas. You could get a computer program to piece together a plot from time-honored tropes, archetypes, templates, and act-based story structure. Where things get harder, and require a human touch, is in making things interesting. Setting, to a degree. But most important, characters. Compelling, human, relatable, challenging, interesting, flawed, dynamic characters. These elements are much harder to paint by numbers. Also: style. Very hard to computer-generate an innovative and unique style. I'm not saying these things can't be done, or never will be done, by algorithm. If modern history has taught us anything, it's that we can never underestimate what technology will make possible. For the foreseeable future, however, I'm still banking on a need for human fiction writers.
- lupatus 15y ago
  I agree that human reviewers will be needed, especially in the beginning, to both fix-up the output stories and to iteratively improve the engine. But, I think that the engine could definitely pump out and use characters that are interesting. For example, lets say we give the character 1-n flaws. Drawn from our list of flaws, we could pick "Abandonment issues", and that flaw could have modifiers like "abandoned by parents at birth", "abandoned by crew on an island", or "abandoned by creators to shovel trash into little cubes". That flaw could then be used to pick certain plot devices to be used at certain points in the story skeleton. Characters drive stories and we've just made the basis for Luke Skywalker, Captain Jack Sparrow, and Wall-E. Also, I agree that it will take a little while to define the different cadences and vernaculars used in, for example, a Fairy Tale vs. a Crime Noir story, but I do think it is possible to make such definitions. "Once upon a time in a land far, far away, ...." vs. "On a dark and stormy night, she burst into my office with legs a mile long...."
  - jonnathanson 15y ago
    The problem with this approach is that it will, at best, churn out formulaic and derivative product. All fiction relies on some degree of formula, but good fiction is not formulaic. Good fiction breaks new ground, finds new twists on old tropes, invents new tropes outright, or invents new worlds and new personas in breakthrough ways. Good fiction, like all good art, is inherently creative. It creates what didn't exist before. While all art has its influences, its processes, its references, and its tropes, it is not a simple recombination of these things. Again, I'm not saying a program will never turn out great, or even decent, fiction. But I think that day is far off. In the interim, we already have what could be classified as -- albeit in a very loose sense of the word -- cooperative fiction by man-machine collaborations. Writers use programs like Final Draft and Scrivener to help them keep track of characters and plot points, notes, formats, outlines, etc. It's not a huge stretch to imagine future iterations of these programs that offer algorithmically-guided notes on the structure, settings, consistencies and inconsistencies, etc., as the author is writing or editing. In the same way that a word processor runs automatic spell check, these programs might someday run automatic plot check (Imagine some dystopian, futuristic version of Clippy: "It looks like you're writing a science fiction novel; do you want some structural templates?")
danssig 15y ago
I think Hollywood has been using a program like this to generate movies for the last 5 years at least.

by lupatus 15y ago

aperrien 15y ago

This sounds really interesting. If you do this, can you post your progress and results?

lupatus 15y ago
Sure. I've been thinking of taking a stab at Romance novels first because they tend to be very formulaic and are a surprisingly profitable fiction niche.
- IsaacL 15y ago
  I think Mills and Boons titles are probably generated by a very simple grammar: The [Nationality] [High-powered Profession]'s [Asdjective for Sexy] [Synonym for Lover]. Eg The Turkish Millionaire's Sultry Mistress, The North Korean Cadre's Sleazy Hooker, etc. But I think your project could be AI-hard - to write a compelling story you'd need to have a virtual world with virtual characters with virtual psychologies. You'd need to be able to model complicated stuff like "Romeo knows Juliet thinks he is already dead", and simple stuff like "If Romeo is under Juliet's balcony, he can't see her until he climbs up". Interesting project though.
  - lupatus 15y ago
    Good point. I wonder if you could specify pre-/post-requirements for plot devices to make the scenarios you described easier to handle.

akg_67 15y ago

Could this be done in reverse by software? Instead of story-generating engine, automated identification of the plot line, character profile. Basically automatically building the database you mentioned by feeding already written fiction. I think a larger business may be in building such a repository. Story generating engine will commoditize fiction creation.

lupatus 15y ago
I think that there are far fewer plot devices, character stereotypes, and background scenes for fiction than you expect. There are enough though to have, at least, 100s of millions of possible combinations. And those combinations are where the "creative" novelty of fiction novels arises. For example, let us suppose that at the end of Braveheart, instead of getting disemboweled, Optimus Prime flys down out of the sky, kills the executioner, saves Mel Gibson, and lays waste to the English forces; thus allowing Mel Gibson to have his revenge and to ride off into the sunset with the English queen. Creative? Sure. Formulaic? Yes! I think that a few Google searches would reveal lists of the majority of the different story components
jacques_chester 15y ago
I wrote a project proposal for this (though I went with a different project) and there's some existing work. Email me and I'll send it to you.

jonnathanson 15y ago

Sure, all stories rely on formulas. That's nothing shocking or new. Even the ancient Greeks wrote about how all stories break down into a handful of basic formulas. You could get a computer program to piece together a plot from time-honored tropes, archetypes, templates, and act-based story structure. Where things get harder, and require a human touch, is in making things interesting. Setting, to a degree. But most important, characters. Compelling, human, relatable, challenging, interesting, flawed, dynamic characters. These elements are much harder to paint by numbers. Also: style. Very hard to computer-generate an innovative and unique style. I'm not saying these things can't be done, or never will be done, by algorithm. If modern history has taught us anything, it's that we can never underestimate what technology will make possible. For the foreseeable future, however, I'm still banking on a need for human fiction writers.

lupatus 15y ago
I agree that human reviewers will be needed, especially in the beginning, to both fix-up the output stories and to iteratively improve the engine. But, I think that the engine could definitely pump out and use characters that are interesting. For example, lets say we give the character 1-n flaws. Drawn from our list of flaws, we could pick "Abandonment issues", and that flaw could have modifiers like "abandoned by parents at birth", "abandoned by crew on an island", or "abandoned by creators to shovel trash into little cubes". That flaw could then be used to pick certain plot devices to be used at certain points in the story skeleton. Characters drive stories and we've just made the basis for Luke Skywalker, Captain Jack Sparrow, and Wall-E. Also, I agree that it will take a little while to define the different cadences and vernaculars used in, for example, a Fairy Tale vs. a Crime Noir story, but I do think it is possible to make such definitions. "Once upon a time in a land far, far away, ...." vs. "On a dark and stormy night, she burst into my office with legs a mile long...."
- jonnathanson 15y ago
  The problem with this approach is that it will, at best, churn out formulaic and derivative product. All fiction relies on some degree of formula, but good fiction is not formulaic. Good fiction breaks new ground, finds new twists on old tropes, invents new tropes outright, or invents new worlds and new personas in breakthrough ways. Good fiction, like all good art, is inherently creative. It creates what didn't exist before. While all art has its influences, its processes, its references, and its tropes, it is not a simple recombination of these things. Again, I'm not saying a program will never turn out great, or even decent, fiction. But I think that day is far off. In the interim, we already have what could be classified as -- albeit in a very loose sense of the word -- cooperative fiction by man-machine collaborations. Writers use programs like Final Draft and Scrivener to help them keep track of characters and plot points, notes, formats, outlines, etc. It's not a huge stretch to imagine future iterations of these programs that offer algorithmically-guided notes on the structure, settings, consistencies and inconsistencies, etc., as the author is writing or editing. In the same way that a word processor runs automatic spell check, these programs might someday run automatic plot check (Imagine some dystopian, futuristic version of Clippy: "It looks like you're writing a science fiction novel; do you want some structural templates?")

danssig 15y ago

I think Hollywood has been using a program like this to generate movies for the last 5 years at least.