Article written by Rory Hawkins.
As annoying the human race can be at times, we have a monopoly on being creative. Sure, the natural world has generous entries as well; skim through Planet Earth for the bowerbird, brightly decorating its nest to attract a mate. Still, it’s closer to biological necessity than creativity running free.
Take a moment to be a little proud about yourself: as a human, you are part of the biggest artistic force to have ever walked the earth. Don’t let it go to your head. As creative as anyone can claim to be, nothing’s original.
But that’s okay. Whether or not something’s been done before doesn’t really faze us. What captures attention in any field of interest is how newness brings an unknown edge, something that had been overlooked before it was polished to absolute usefulness.
Innovation lends itself to creativity. We can achieve much more with better tools; think about the phone or computer you’re using right now. Our current technology helps us record and transmit information far better than anything before – innovation.
Hurriedly typing anything, you’re bound to stumble over typos and grammar alerts – from what it already knows about language, technology tells you what doesn’t quite make sense. At the most basic level, that’s a computer telling you how to write.
The innovator’s reaction? How about we ramp that up. Instead of being assisted by the computer, we could just input the general information and have it written for us, no further spelling or grammar checks required.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) pops into the headlines now and again, almost as a novelty. “Look where science is taking us now!” I’m not mocking – the race to create a “perfect” AI is real, and there’s fame and fortune to be made. In fact, AI is already widely employed in research and writing.
You might’ve already read about Botnik, an online community of writers and programmers that back in December 2017, using a simple AI to analyse sentence structure and vocabulary, rewrote part of J K Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix.
The beginning of Harry Potter and the Portrait of What Looked like a Large Pile of Ash reads promisingly. Just by generating words and matching them to Rowling’s writing style, a computer really wrote its own Harry Potter fanfic. Unfortunately, like most fanfics, it’s only a matter of time before it gets silly.
Obviously, there’s only so many resources to be pooled together when the final goal is imitation Harry Potter. But the sentiment is pure curiosity: could AI write something as “creative” as a human being?
Like I said, nothing’s original. Overall writing (plot, characters, themes) can evoke emotions that are more than the sum of words on a page but those are the building blocks, they have an orderly pattern. And like the binary code of their programming, computers “love” patterns.
Automated technology already performs so many tasks that we’d rather not do ourselves. What’s more, it can do it better. In chess and other board games, AI can defeat the best human players by adjusting play style to follow a winning pattern.
AI, or at least forms of algorithms, are already used by online media companies to trawl through information, in part by following the pattern of words. Facebook recently launched their “campaign against fake news” – how are they doing it? AI detecting specific patterns and word use.
Whether you want to think about it or not, AI is now a defining feature in the flow of information, online and otherwise. Media outlets use it to streamline research time, much like everyday people do when we want to know where the nearest odd-shop is to repair our favourite thing-a-ma-do. AI follows (or maybe even sets?) informational trends – what we take in.
But first and foremost, I’m a creative writer – my specific interest is how developing AI impacts literature. If “good writing” is subjective, being very on-trend, then what’s stopping an intelligent enough AI paired with a human to write the next big thing? There’s weirder ways to come up with ideas.
This too isn’t just science fiction. In 2016, a team of Japanese computer scientists from Future University Hakodate entered Hoshi Shinichi literary award with a novella written by the AI they had created and developed. It would be blind-judged – no one on the panel would know who or how it was written.
Its translated title: The Day a Computer Writes a Novel. Not the most deviant from their source, I’ll admit, but with lines like ‘I writhed with joy, which I experienced for the first time, and kept writing with excitement. The day a computer wrote a novel.
The computer, placing priority on the pursuit of its own joy, stopped working for humans’ there’s a logical poeticism to the prose. That would make sense with the AI/team’s “writing process” – feeding words, lines and phrases for the program to order, rather than an AI coming up with everything from scratch.
Whilst judges noted how well structured the writing was, its characters fell short in their development and the novella only passed one of the four rounds required to win. Still, out of more than a thousand entries, it has to have done better than a lot of humans.
Project lead, Hitoshi Matsubura, was undeterred. ‘In future, I’d like to expand AI’s potential [so it resembles] human creativity,’ Matsubura told the newspaper Yomiuri Shimbun.
Structuring writing is one task, plotting a narrative concept is another thing entirely. Perhaps that’s where the novella didn’t work? It would only make sense that we as humans need some kind of human experience behind our literature.
As of yet, the method behind an AI writing anything is to order given information, rather than make something of its own. If any AI is to do that, it needs a sense of self more than anything else. Thankfully, we’re well far off from that, and I’m not having to compete with more computers.
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