by Pei-Yixuan Liu
The advent of artificial intelligence (AI) technology has greatly changed people’s lives, and AI can be found present in all walks of life. The question is- can AI also be a novelist or screenwriter?
Full-length novel by AI now made a reality
In August last year, the South Korean publishing company Parambook released the first full-length novel written by AI. The story features five protagonists who meet on their journeys where they explore the meaning of human existence in the world.
According to stories by Yonhap News Agency, the novel took seven years to finish, with Kim Tae-yon, a computer scientist and writer responsible for conceiving the theme, plot, characters, and other backgrounds. Kim has the AI author named Birampung start writing after reading 1,000 books, and Kim did the post-editing. According to Kim, Birampung, sometimes, sticks to too many details or uses exaggerated words, but, in general, the work possesses high readability.
To writers’ help- keywords of best-selling novels collected using AI algorithm
Mnews reported that Yu-Chen Chen, a student from New Taipei Municipal Linkou Senior High School, taught AI about how humans write novels, and her research won prizes under the track of Social Science Behaviors at a national science fair.
Inspired by an elective course in high school, Chen decided to combine literature and information science for research. Her research features analysis of best-selling novels in online bookstores. After converting the novels into digital files, a crawler was programed to pick up keywords regarding plots of the novels. After this, AI can automatically learn about writing in human styles, using generative adversarial network (GAN). The result came out as a novel plot of over 300 words. Readers can still tell the difference from that written by real humans, but it can already be seen as a prototype.
Wordcraft- an inspiration for writing
Recently, Google has created a set of writing tools, Wordcraft, through its latest generation of conversation AI model- LaMDA. The goal is to help authors create new stories.
Google calls it a “text editor with objectives.” Wordcraft is capable of writing phrases that replace the original texts, making sentences more interesting, and even describing objects on request. Writers invited to test with this Google tool generally believe that Wordcraft is handy for inspiring ideas and creating fun materials.
Conclusion
Some people believe that no matter how powerful AI becomes, it is nothing more than imitating humans, but the innovations in AI have been assisting humans in various tasks. The improvement of work efficiency, the reduction of time spent, and the convenience it brings are all solid proof of advances brought by technologies.
