If you are looking for a startup idea, it may be time to write an app that assists people with creative writing. At least it seems that is where literature - and technology - is headed.
A novel written with the use of artificial intelligence (AI) algorithm passed the screening process for a literary award in Japan.
The year of 2016 has seen the first time that a piece of work co-authored by a human and a computer was submitted for the Nikkei Hoshi Shinichi Literary Award. The rules of the competition allow for such submissions, but this option has never been exercised before.
Out of 1450 novels considered for the award in the general category, 11 were written with the participation of an AI. When assessing the qualities of the submitted literature, the jury is not aware, whether the novel is written by a human or a program code took part, which ensures impartiality.
The short-novel that managed to pass the pre-selection by the jury is serendipitously called ‘The Day a Computer Writes a Novel’. It was presented by a team, headed by Hitoshi Matsubara, who is a professor at Future University Hakodate. The human part of the writing team was responsible for setting the framework parameters of the book like the plot, the gender of the characters and pre-made sentence templates. The computer filled in the framework with content by composing sentences or selecting words, prepared by the humans.
Being pre-selected by the jury signifies high literary qualities of the end product. A Japanese novelist Satoshi Hase admitted at the press-conference: “I was surprised, because it was a well-structured novel. But there are still some problems, affect the prize-winning chances, such as character descriptions.”
Until now AI intelligence algorithms have been used to solve tasks that have specific answers, like playing Go, Shogi or chess. The tendency and the end-goal of the works is to expand the AI capabilities so it matches human creativity.
Until that happens, the practice shows that the best results are achieved when artificial intelligence is paired with that of humans. For example, the human-robot teams are notably stronger at chess than human or robots alone. We can see that it is getting there with literary, musical and visual arts as well.
The computer-written novel did not get the Japanese national award in the end. So we may not worry about the Skynet just yet.
More on the topic:
We Should Be more Afraid of Computers Than We Are
What Happens When Our Computers Get Smarter Than We Are?