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| Photo taken from Botnik's Harry Potter post |
As A.I. advances, we see new forms of content being created. One of my more recent favorites is fanfiction that is being created with A.I. In particular, a company called Botnik Studios is working on a predictive writer that can analyze content and output new content in the same style. I originally stumbled upon this creation on Tumblr, but as it turns out, there have been quite a few websites covering some of Botnik's works. In particular, a website called The Verge wrote an article called This Harry Potter AI-generated fanfiction is remarkably good, and just as the title says, it is remarkably good for what A.I. is today.
Thus far, Botnik has created predictive keyboards to write new lyrics for specific bands, facts about animals (which of course are probably not true, but sound like they could be true), cooking recipes, TV episode scripts, romance related topics, advertisements, holiday related topics (tips, history, and songs), poetry, book narrations and dialogs, video game tips and titles, tech reviews and quizzes, among other miscellaneous topics. Botnik has a page of all available predictive keyboards here if you would like to play around with any.
From this technology has spawned quite an interesting chapter of Harry Potter fanfiction titled Harry Potter and the Portrait of What Looked Like A Large Pile Of Ash which can be found here on Botnik's website. The new chapter opens on Harry, Ron, and Hermione, and it closes with strange instances such as long pumpkins falling out of McGonagall, mice exploding, and Dumbledore's hair scooting... Of course because A.I. is not perfect in this day and age, the first chapter is not completely sound, but it is incredibly enjoyable to read and it does seem to be somewhat stylistically close to how J.K. Rolling writes. At the bottom of each post by Botnik introducing a new writing, you can see that they will specify the algorithm used. So, in the case of Harry Potter and the Portrait of What Looked Like A Large Pile Of Ash, Botnik utilized its predictive algorithm. Unfortunately, there is only one chapter available from Botnik's website at the moment, but hopefully in the future we can see a completed work.
So knowing this, I find myself asking whether or not A.I. will ever be able to write completely new content that sounds exactly as it was written by a person. Do you think it is possible that someday it will be common for books and book series written by A.I. to be published and readily available at place like Barnes & Noble? Is content written by A.I. something that you would be interested in reading regularly?
I've also read the AI written piece you linked above and found the new adventure of Harry, Ron, and Hermione to be absolutely hysterical! Looking forward, I could find myself and many others to regularly read AI-written pieces. Along with that, I also find it to be quite feasible for AI-written pieces to be found at Barnes and Noble and published to the public.
ReplyDeleteThis makes me think of a few questions:
ReplyDeleteWho gets credit for the writing? Is it the AI, the software developers, or somewhere in between?
Will there be a bias for or against AI books/papers? If we can't tell the difference between the an AI writing and a human's writing, what does that mean for AI?
I think eventually A.I. will eventually be able to write completely new content. But as of now, I think we aren't quite there yet. I think that this topic is pretty similar to some topics we have talked about in class already like, the Turing test and analyzing twitter feed. A.I. needs to be able to analyze human language and to produce human language at a higher level in order to write new content that sounds exactly as it was written by a person.
ReplyDeleteThis takes me back to the Chinese Room Argument and our discussion of AI creativity. The AI "wrote" it, in that it generated the order of the words, but half the reason it comes across as so silly is due to the fact that the unit does not understand the very material it has created. So maybe we can teach it to regurgitate the tone of a real human writer, but we still must acknowledge the core functionality and capability of creating something as being lost on it. It does not speak in a language of understanding or rhetorical capability.
ReplyDeleteI think in the near future, machine can start to understand nature language completely. And if that day come, they might be able to write something more genuine than just follow someone else style. I wonder if that could be count as creativity or not.
DeleteI thought I already commented on this post, but, apparently I didn't.
ReplyDeleteFirst, the fanfiction was hilarious. I haven't read the books, so I can't judge how similar it is to Rowling's work. It truly works as fanfiction: a ridiculous take on fictional characters.
It kind of reminds me of Mad Libs where you're feeding some words and it produces a mostly-coherent written work. Mad Libs is more clearly a human-created activity, though, kind of like online name generators.
Anyway, I'd argue that the creator(s) of the software get the credit as computers don't typically get legal credits for things yet. Unless I'm wrong about that?
I agree with some of the previous comments that AI doesn't really understand what it is writing it is just creating structured sentences that when put together do not make much sense. I think it will be a long time before AI will be able to create a rich novel like Harry Potter with a well described and interesting world and characters with character progression.
ReplyDeleteI'm a big fan of these types of AI networks. When this came out I was all over it. I'm hoping that one day an AI model will be able to author an actual, sensible series of novels. I'd read 'em.
ReplyDelete