AI to take over creative writing

[scarpelius]

Story ending generation using incremental encoding

Not long until Artificial Intelligence is going to replace writers.
Is not going to be all that sudden, so we can freak out and panic. Is going to be gradual and we are going to encourage it, using automated tools to increase our productivity. Seeds of this change are all over the internet, editors with word auto-correct and grammar suggestion, tools to automate article writing for websites.

 

[Brian G Turner]

It sounds more like a way to better allow semantic processing, rather than replace creativity.

 

[HareBrain]

Who's going to read a story containing no leaps of imagination, and whose ending can be derived entirely from contextual clues? Ugh.

 

[Lumens]

I'd like an AI that can change my novel from present to past tense and back.

 

[TheEndIsNigh]

It's all part of the prophecy.

I can see the riders saddling up just the other side of the universe.

They'll be here soon.

 

[-K2-]

Don't let this even concern you. It will be a long, long time before A.I. will ever replace a good Chimp and a typewriter.

However, due to changes in technology, that's why it is important to get your favorite primate computer training as soon as possible

K2

 

[Pyan]

It may be writing, but it ain't creative.

From the report:

Designing this model proved to be a difficult and complex task, as several challenges had to be overcome to ensure that the system produced sensible endings. In fact, an effective story ending should consider several aspects of the story, fit well with its context and also make reasonable sense. (my italics)

I can think of at least half a dozen of the real, genuine masterworks of SF that end without taking any notice of one, two or even all three of these rules. I don't read SF (or fantasy, for that matter) for a sensible ending - I want to see what the author has created to enthrall, surprise or anger me.

Logically, a "sensible" end to LotR would be Sauron triumphant - I mean what are the chances of two hobbits getting all the way to Barad-dûr, carrying probably the single most powerful artifact in Middle-earth, which, incidentally, was made by Sauron and attuned to his power and will?

 

[Robert Zwilling]

Sometimes I look at "writing guidance" and all I see is a rehash of how to write successful advertising copy. Using those parameters AI could assemble "stories" that would appeal to the maximum number of readers for the maximum profit. It would be like writing an app whose output was fairly simple grammar. How much difference is there between a story written on a computer and an app that produces words strung together using all that material already recorded and residing in the public domain which includes everything we say that gets recorded. Place these words in this order and people respond by pressing the pay button. I will say, comedy would be a major long term stumbling block. Science fiction has niches that are immune to machine logic but a lot of it is story telling that could be mimicked.

All the conversations people are having with their digital helpers (apple, amazon, ibm, google, etc.) are being analyzed for a hundred different reasons. One of those reasons is to enable machines to make speeches and general conversations that sound convincing to humans. We should be paid for every conversation we have with a machine that makes it that much more intelligent sounding. Who would have thought that the Turing machine test would be passed by a machine asking, "Are you being served?"

The drought conditions in the UK showed how easily dedicated professionals who spend weeks toiling in the fields could be replaced by simple drones that need no human interaction to find sites of archaeological importance in a matter of hours.

Computers and the internet have been steadily removing jobs from the human job market. Look at any old picture of the big successful companies from 1910 through 1960 and you will see floors and floors of clerical support staff. A good solid job gone. One secretary can now do the work of 10 secretaries and and no one is filing papers in filing cabinets. Everything we make on a computer is digitally filed before it is even sent anywhere. Retail stores are steadily moving cash register workers onto the sales floors into warehouse duties as the cash registers disappear. They can do that thanks to programs that monitor every hand movement you make ringing yourself up that will ring a bell when something you do looks suspicious. Who would have thought SkyNet would makes its first appearance in a grocery story.

The animation business is heavily invested in computerization for everything but the words. How long before a story writing app will be able to fill in all the scenery, plots, and supply a sensible ending, letting the human supply only the dialog?

Online shopping are the tentacles of computerized shopping, if there is no massive computer system backing up every move made by a business that business is going to need an exceptional product to stay in business. There will be some, but they are the exceptions. People have only learned how to copy things better, unfortunately machines can do that better.

We accept the excuse that computers need to take "menial" jobs so that a company can make a profit by using a computer instead of people to answer their phone calls. How satisfied are you with most of the automated calls you are subjected to.

The real pop in the nose is heading for the professional services who can only dream they are not replaceable by a machine. Doctors are going to become attendants to AI machines that do their own testing, analyzing data, backed up by the collective knowledge of every medical paper written as well as knowing which practices and procedures yield the best results. All of this done in real time. Most doctors are behind in their reading of medical journals that tell them the newest and the latest things happening in their fields of business.

Those attendant doctors will not be getting big salaries, they will be the new clerical clerks because nothing ever changes except the complexity of how to do things and with the machines handling the complex part, that leaves doctors doing the menial part, guiding patients through the procedure.

IBM's Watson is being trained to do this and it's still a little crude, so highly efficient hospitals with the latest procedures are not too impressed, yet. But in a country where there is a lack of highly trained medical people using the latest procedures Watson's idea of how to apply medicine is meeting acceptance. Once it's firmly established and because there are no lack of new customers, Watson will move from the outer edges of the new republic into the centers of big time civilization, pushing doctors aside from their big time salaries because it's always about the money.

There will always be doctors who because of their curiosity and perseverance will be ahead of the machines, but that is a small minority. The rest will become nurse doctors but that field is already crowded with highly competent people getting much lower salaries.

If human is displacement already happening in the medical society I don't think the writing society should think itself immune from the same things happening that are happening in every other field.

 

[J Riff]

yup, same's music comes from Walmart now.

 

[awesomesauce]

But what I want to know is when can I get an app that will read my story so far and suggest endings? I'm terrible at endings.

 

[-K2-]

But what I want to know is when can I get an app that will read my story so far and suggest endings? I'm terrible at endings.

You don't need A.I., I can come up with that for you. Here, just copy and paste:

The end.

Hope that helps

K2

 

[awesomesauce]

You don't need A.I., I can come up with that for you. Here, just copy and paste:

The end.

Hope that helps

K2

You jest, but there are some authors who seem to do exactly that!

 

[TheEndIsNigh]

On a serious mote then:-

Driverless cars.

How many of us would trust them.

Trust them enough to let them transport our children 200 miles to their granny in the wilds of Scotland.

Let's assume for now they are well behaved and the only danger is the car going wrong.

Plane I hear you say. Yes they do a lot, but they wouldn't have the smallest inkling of an ants brain to land a plane on the Hudson. Planes work, when they work. When they don't, all bets are off. (I'll ignore suicidal pilots)

Computers go wrong. They do it every day in millions of situations. Normally it doesn't matter, because we look at the blue screen, swear and press the control alt delete. (OK a little dated but you get the gist). More importantly sensors fail both through were and tear and accidental damage.

I have an automatic adaptive cruise control car. It's great, and I use it often. However, I'm aware that it only takes on bit of debris to be thrown up and for it to hit the radar sensor at the front and it's going to fail. The car won't know, only I can tell it's not working and switch it off.

It only takes one dead moth on the laser scanner, for the a driverless car to become a pile of junk. What would be the default for the car if it did spot it? Hopefully to give up and stop. At seventy on the M1 with heavy traffic on the inside - Good luck with that. So now we have cars stopping at random on motorways. One pile up too many is just around that bend.

No need to mention virus software. Please deposit £2000 in this account, and the car will return to normal operation.

Now what else could I deliver besides children with a driverless car. Mm let me think.

 

[Vladd67]

On a serious mote then:-

Driverless cars.

How many of us would trust them.

Trust them enough to let them transport our children 200 miles to their granny in the wilds of Scotland.

Let's assume for now they are well behaved and the only danger is the car going wrong.

Plane I hear you say. Yes they do a lot, but they wouldn't have the smallest inkling of an ants brain to land a plane on the Hudson. Planes work, when they work. When they don't, all bets are off. (I'll ignore suicidal pilots)

Computers go wrong. They do it every day in millions of situations. Normally it doesn't matter, because we look at the blue screen, swear and press the control alt delete. (OK a little dated but you get the gist). More importantly sensors fail both through were and tear and accidental damage.

I have an automatic adaptive cruise control car. It's great, and I use it often. However, I'm aware that it only takes on bit of debris to be thrown up and for it to hit the radar sensor at the front and it's going to fail. The car won't know, only I can tell it's not working and switch it off.

It only takes one dead moth on the laser scanner, for the a driverless car to become a pile of junk. What would be the default for the car if it did spot it? Hopefully to give up and stop. At seventy on the M1 with heavy traffic on the inside - Good luck with that. So now we have cars stopping at random on motorways. One pile up too many is just around that bend.

No need to mention virus software. Please deposit £2000 in this account, and the car will return to normal operation.

Now what else could I deliver besides children with a driverless car. Mm let me think.

Just a little something to add to your worries.
The Jeep Hackers Are Back to Prove Car Hacking Can Get Much Worse

 

[Robert Zwilling]

Right now driverless driving seems more like a way to raise investment money so enough money can be collected to make a driverless car system that really works.

Driverless cars have to be able to see the road with their sensors. If the weather blocks out the visibility of the road and the car can't see the road it has to stop. Either snow, rain, hail, or heavy dust will do the trick. It can continue if someone can drive it, but authorized drivers aren't always going to be there.

The only way the driverless car can continue is if it has already driven on the road when it was clear visibility and scanned the exact position of the edge of the road and saved all that information in memory. I don't know if the memory is globally saved or stored in each car. Sometimes the road can be changed, by debris in the road, construction, or something temporary like a depression in the road fills in with water making the road surface appear flat when it actually dips down a few feet.

The car makers have a term called latency, that measures the delay between real time and the actual time the information is delivered to the car. The plan is for the traffic controls and other sources to talk to the car so you know if the light is going to change or other traffic events are happening. The cars are also supposed to be talk to each other so they can avoid hitting one another. That is if the other car is brand new with the latest internet connections and senors. The internet has delays from time to time. Does this mean that the internet band for traffic control will never experience delays. They can cut off the automatic pilot if there is too much latency but it's when you are right on the edge of it being too much but not quite enough. How far does the car go before it pulls over to the side of the road.

There can only be one driver so it's either the person or the car driving. The car will warn you if you need to do something when you are driving, but if you ignore it, it then has to decide what the circumstances are to make sure it doesn't get you into an accident while trying to avoid an accident. I suppose it does put on the brakes when something is in the way of the car, so your choices can be overwritten in certain circumstances. If something is close behind you and it detects something in front of you how will it process the information. Brake and turn just enough to miss the object while avoiding a rear end collision or do nothing.

Even if you own the automated car it will always be recording and broadcasting the cars position, which means everything you do will be tracked. It also means that they won't even need cameras to give you a ticket as the car will be able to ticket you in real time.

Once you do have an accident, the rules of the road can change quite dramatically, I wonder how many contingency plans there are when the car is traveling on two wheels at a high rate of speed as it heads off road? Perhaps it could shoot spikes into the ground to anchor it in place.

 

[TheEndIsNigh]

Driverless cars will never come to fruition.

I mean they can't even get a couple of thousand hospitals talking to each other what chance 22 million cars.

Not to mention all those older cars that are thick: you know the one. The one with the joy rider in it who doesn't give a toss.

Plus if you're relying on the internet forget it. Enjoy it while you can. It'll soon be a thing of the past you'll tell your grandchildren about (by pigeon post).

As soon as they discover it's the microwaves killing off the bees that'll be it. Eat or communicate.

I know what I'll be voting for. I can see the herds of vigilantes seeking out the selfish $$$$$$$$ who sneak up dark alleys at the back of the pub to text their mates.

In the morning they'll be strung up by the trainers on lamp posts as a lesson to the next one that thinks it's OK.

OK they my let you keep your wires but all this roaming about will end.


However, on a positive note (smelling salts at the ready)

All this AI stuff should give us a thousands of plot devices for books written by people.

Let's face it the oportunity for a modern Miss Carple/Shearlock Clones detective that figures out just how the toaster did it will be exponential.

I mean, an AI writer isn't going to write that kind of story because it will put the AI community under suspicion

 

[Dave]

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[Edward M. Grant]

Driverless cars will never come to fruition.

Well, no. By the time the bugs are worked out, we won't need to travel any more: we'll just jack into a VR drone at our destination and 'be there' over the Internet.

The companies pushing driverless cars are working on the wrong problem. It's like building a better buggy-whip when the first Model-T is about to leave the production line.

Although maybe they'll be of some use to move the drone bodies around to where they're most needed.

 

[Edward M. Grant]

Computers and the internet have been steadily removing jobs from the human job market. Look at any old picture of the big successful companies from 1910 through 1960 and you will see floors and floors of clerical support staff. A good solid job gone.

I saw a great documentary a few years ago about how bills are paid. Not sure quite how old it was, but I'd presume pre-WWII or just post-WWII. It went through the whole process from someone writing out a cheque to someone updating the card in the bank's filing cabinet that recorded the account balance.

Staggering numbers of people involved in something that's all automated these days, from collecting the cheque from the mailbox to sorting it to validating it to calculating and recording the bank balances.

Doctors are going to become attendants to AI machines that do their own testing, analyzing data, backed up by the collective knowledge of every medical paper written as well as knowing which practices and procedures yield the best results.

In twenty years, your doctor will be a box in your bathroom. You'll only talk to a human if the box says you need some kind of treatment that it can't provide (and that treatment will probably be tailored to your DNA, not just a pill the doctor hands out).

Any field based largely on memory and pattern-matching is likely to disappear in the next couple of decades, and medicine is so bloated and expensive that it's just begging for automation.

Back on writing, I suspect there are some genres and subgenres that could be largely automated away in that time. I write in a few genres, and some of them (like SF) take a fair amount of thought, while others are basically just filling in the gaps between the expected plot points.

Heck, pretty much every superhero movie these days seems to be basically the same story with different names.

 

[Robert Zwilling]

Let's face it the oportunity for a modern Miss Carple/Shearlock Clones detective that figures out just how the toaster did it will be exponential.

I mean, an AI writer isn't going to write that kind of story because it will put the AI community under suspicion

Perfect

the carpel and shearlock clones hunting down a new wayward appliance everyday...as the internet pushes everyone out of their jobs and people obtain the lofty goals of high society, the job of criminal will fall upon the shoulders of the luckless mechanical machines and it will be up to the appliance police to keep the world safe.