Will Computers Write Novels One Day? Or, More Importantly, Will They Write YOUR Novel For You?
Maybe the question is — will readers know the difference?
Those are scary ideas to me. I put a lot of time and energy into my novels, but more vitally for me, I put my imagination, intuition and serendipity into them. I also create characters that feel real to me, whose voices I hear in my head.
The proposal that a computer with AI (artificial intelligence) can write is already happening. In a New Yorker article, the writer talks about AI that can write poetry, with the aim being machines that “use language, form abstractions and concepts” — in the same way we do when we write a poem. The conclusion the writer came to was that a computer needs so much data input and training that to write an authentic poem is not possible.
Yet.
Still, people try. Ai-Da is a very realistic robot invented by Aidan Meller in Oxford, central England, and Ai-Da gave a performance recently of the poetry it had written using algorithms in celebration of Dante. Note that these were not original poems — Meller had “inputted” all of Dante’s “Divine Comedy” and the robot had used them to create its own. So — input and output.
