Japanese AI Program Wrote a Short Novel, Almost Won a Literary Prize (digitaltrends.com)

An anonymous reader cites a Digital Trends article: A Japanese AI program has co-authored a short-form novel that passed the first round of screening for a national literary prize. The robot-written novel didn't win the competition's final prize, but who's to say it won't improve in its next attempt? The novel is actually called The Day A Computer Writes A Novel, or "Konpyuta ga shosetsu wo kaku hi" in Japanese. The meta-narrative wasn't enough to win first prize at the third Nikkei Hoshi Shinichi Literary Award ceremony, but it did come close. Officially, the novel was written by a very human team that led the AI program's development. Hitoshi Matsubara and his team at Future University Hakodate in Japan selected words and sentences, and set parameters for construction before letting the AI "write" the novel autonomously.

Comments

Re:This would be more reasonable if...

[HornWumpus]

I don't believe you've actually read 'Finnegan's Wake'. Nobody can finish that. Even the authors of the 'Cliff's Notes' only read other summaries.

Professors that make a living off it, don't actually read it. Bluffing, every one.

I have seen it excepted for good effect in a book on lunatics. Retired 'loony bin attendants' might have a chance at finishing it, but I doubt any of them miss it that much. Can you picture nurse Ratchet putting down her drink to read the same kind of BS she had to deal with for 30 years?

I think the trick to reading it is to do it the same way it was written: Blackout drunk, not putting down long term memory. Or alternatively, in 60 second bites starting on random pages, before throwing the book at the wall...separated by 20 years.

The Japanese do continue to be massively over represented in the world's collection of WTF?