3 ms·

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

by 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?")

by lupatus 15y ago

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?")