Computer Stories: A.I. Is Beginning to Assist Novelists
Computer Stories: A.I. Is Beginning to Assist Novelists
Robin Sloan, in his office in the Murray Street Media Lab
in Berkeley, Calif. He is using a computer program he created to help write his
latest novel.
By David Streitfel Oct. 18, 2018
BERKELEY, Calif. — Robin Sloan has a collaborator on his
new novel: a computer.
The idea that a novelist is someone struggling alone in a
room, equipped with nothing more than determination and inspiration, could soon
be obsolete. Mr. Sloan is writing his book with the help of home-brewed
software that finishes his sentences with the push of a tab key.
It’s probably too early to add “novelist” to the long
list of jobs that artificial intelligence will eliminate. But if you watch Mr.
Sloan at work, it is quickly clear that programming is on the verge of
redefining creativity.
Mr. Sloan, who won acclaim for his debut, “Mr. Penumbra’s
24-Hour Bookstore,” composes by writing snippets of text, which he sends to
himself as messages and then works over into longer passages. His new novel,
which is still untitled, is set in a near-future California where nature is
resurgent. The other day, the writer made this note: “The bison are back. Herds
50 miles long.”
In his cluttered man-cave of an office in an industrial
park here, he is now expanding this slender notion. He writes: The bison are
gathered around the canyon. … What comes next? He hits tab. The computer makes
a noise like “pock,” analyzes the last few sentences, and adds the phrase “by
the bare sky.”
Mr. Sloan likes it. “That’s kind of fantastic,” he said.
“Would I have written ‘bare sky’ by myself? Maybe, maybe not.”
He moves on: The bison have been traveling for two years
back and forth. … Tab, pock. The computer suggests between the main range of
the city.
“That wasn’t what I was thinking at all, but it’s
interesting,” the writer said. “The lovely language just pops out and I go,
‘Yes.’ ”
His software is not labeled anything as grand as
artificial intelligence. It’s machine learning, facilitating and extending his
own words, his own imagination. At one level, it merely helps him do what
fledgling writers have always done — immerse themselves in the works of those
they want to emulate. Hunter Thompson, for instance, strived to write in the
style of F. Scott Fitzgerald, so he retyped “The Great Gatsby” several times as
a shortcut to that objective.
Writers are readers, after all. “I have read some
uncounted number of books and words over the years that all went into my brain
and stewed together in unknown and unpredictable ways, and then certain things
come out,” Mr. Sloan said. “The output can’t be anything but a function of the
input.”
But the input can be pushed in certain directions. A
quarter-century ago, an electronic surveillance consultant named Scott French
used a supercharged Mac to imitate Jacqueline Susann’s sex-drenched tales. His
approach was different from Mr. Sloan’s. Mr. French wrote thousands of
computer-coded rules suggesting how certain character types derived from Ms.
Susann’s works might plausibly interact.
It took Mr. French and his Mac eight years to finish the
tale — he reckoned he could have done it by himself in one. “Just This Once”
was commercially published, a significant achievement in itself, although it
did not join Ms. Susann’s “Valley of the Dolls” on the best-seller list.
A tinkerer and experimenter, Mr. Sloan started down the
road of computer-assisted creation driven by little more than “basic, nerdy
curiosity.” Many others have been experimenting with fiction that pushes in the
direction of A.I.
Botnik Studios used a predictive text program to generate
four pages of rather wild Harry Potter fan fiction, which featured lines like
these: “He saw Harry and immediately began to eat Hermione’s family.” On a more
serious level, the Alibaba Group, the Chinese e-commerce company, said in
January that its software for the first time outperformed humans on a global
reading comprehension test. If the machines can read, then they can write.
Mr. Sloan wanted to see for himself. He acquired from the
Internet Archive a database of texts: issues of Galaxy and If, two popular
science fiction magazines in the 1950s and ’60s. After trial and error, the
program came up with a sentence that impressed him: “The slow-sweeping tug
moved across the emerald harbor.”
“It was a line that made you say, ‘Tell me more,’” Mr.
Sloan said.
Those original magazines were too limiting, however, full
of clichés and stereotypes. So Mr. Sloan augmented the pool with what he calls
“The California Corpus,” which includes the digital text of novels by John
Steinbeck, Dashiell Hammett, Joan Didion, Philip K. Dick and others; Johnny
Cash’s poems; Silicon Valley oral histories; old Wired articles; the California
Department of Fish and Wildlife’s Fish Bulletin; and more. “It’s growing and
changing all the time,” he said.
Unlike Mr. French a quarter-century ago, Mr. Sloan
probably will not use his computer collaborator as a selling point for the
finished book. He’s restricting the A.I. writing in the novel to an A.I.
computer that is a significant character, which means the majority of the story
will be his own inspiration. But while he has no urge to commercialize the
software, he is intrigued by the possibilities. Megasellers like John Grisham
and Stephen King could relatively easily market programs that used their many
published works to assist fans in producing authorized imitations.
As for the more distant prospects, another San Francisco
Bay Area science fiction writer long ago anticipated a time when novelists
would turn over the composing to computerized “wordmills.” In Fritz Leiber’s
“The Silver Eggheads,” published in 1961, the human “novelists” spend their
time polishing the machines and their reputations. When they try to rebel and
crush the wordmills, they find they have forgotten how to write.
Mr. Sloan has finished his paragraph:
“The bison were lined up fifty miles long, not in the
cool sunlight, gathered around the canyon by the bare sky. They had been
traveling for two years, back and forth between the main range of the city.
They ring the outermost suburbs, grunting and muttering, and are briefly an
annoyance, before returning to the beginning again, a loop that had been
destroyed and was now reconstituted.”
“I like it, but it’s still primitive,” the writer said.
“What’s coming next is going to make this look like crystal radio kits from a
century ago.”
A version of this article appears in print on Oct. 18,
2018, on Page F6 of the New York edition with the headline: A.I. Is Beginning
to Assist Novelists.
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