Is the future of creative writing in the hands of AIs? A few years ago, Stephen Marche used an AI as an aid in writing a science fiction story. In an article, he recounted his journey on how a program called SciFiQ helped him write "Twinkle Twinkle" which he published in Wired.
Our goal in that first experiment was modest: to see if algorithms could be an aid to creativity. Would the process make stories that were just generically consistent? Could an algorithm generate its own distinct style or narrative ideas? Would the resulting story be recognizable as science fiction at all?
The answer to all these questions was yes.
Using the same program, he's writing Krishna and Arjuna which is in its second iteration of the process. For this experiment, he has a narrower goal:
For “Krishna and Arjuna,” we narrowed the focus from science fiction to the subject of my immediate fascination: robots and artificial intelligence. And instead of providing the AI with my favorite robot stories, we gave it every great robot story ever written—many of which I have not read. This may seem like a technical detail, but it’s huge. As a writer I usually read stories and internalize those influences; in this case I’d be submitting to the “influence” of material I’d never even seen.
According to him, the program has various features. For example, upon feeding the program's algorithm with various writings, it gave him a set of instructions on the story’s plot. As he typed into its web-based interface, the program showed how many verbs, adjectives, and adverbs has been used compared to the criteria set by the writings that were fed into it. If the writing passed the criteria, it would turn into green.
Aside from that, there are also word clouds summarizing common topics in the stories that were fed into the algorithm.
Photos by Stephen Marche via MIT Technology Review