Japanese team helps A.I. program pass first round of novel writing contest

Image: Jiangang Wang

We've already seen robots that paint pictures and compose songs, so it only stands to reason that someone would attempt to get one to write a novel.

In this case, the exercise was a team effort between humans and an artificial intelligence (A.I.) program in an attempt to win Japan's Nikkei Hoshi Shinichi Literary Award.

No, the human-assisted A.I. didn't win the prize, but it came close — it passed the contest's initial screening phase.

The human part of the team, led by Hitoshi Matsubara, a professor at Future University Hakodate, came up with the general framing of the story, including plot (the most important part), and the gender of the characters, according to the The Yomiuri Shimbun.

Afterwards, the A.I. cobbled the short novel together by selecting sentences created by the team of humans. So, in this case, the A.I. program needed quite a bit of help from humans to get anywhere close to a real novel.

But even these rudimentary steps are notable given that many have assumed that art — separate and apart from the heavy lifting of robotic auto factories and automated number crunching of data science — would somehow be immune from the rise of A.I. It now appears no sector of human endeavor will be spared the advances inherent in A.I.

Celebrated novelist Hugh Howey (author of Wool, which is set to become a movie) has spent a great deal of time in recent years publicly discussing the possibility of artificial intelligence software writing original novels.

Citing examples of current developments, Howey wrote in 2014, "books will be written with the guidance of humans, who create the outlines of plot while computers fill in the details (a maturation of what James Patterson does with his ghost writers today). Eventually, even the ability to create plot will be automated."

Howey has never seemed more prescient.

Some will point out that even the most perfectly drawn lines or logistically precise stories made by computers can't compare to the improvisational and organic brilliance of the human touch. And that may be true — for now. However, given the rapid advances in A.I. research, in 40 years it's quite possible that even questioning the notion of A.I.-written novels and films will seem quaint to readers and film fans of the future.

This latest attempt at an A.I. written novel comes just days after a computer beat a human playing a game of Go in Korea.