Intelligent machines may some day use the styles of entire genres to create new and
possibly beautiful ones, says one author.
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OAKLAND, Calif. — William Faulkner kept the words flowing with a steady drip of whiskey. Laurence Sterne conquered writer's block by shaving his beard. Ernest Hemingway stopped writing just when the story got good, so he'd always know where to pick up the next day.
But perhaps the next generation of writers may get a boost from robots that do the hard work for them. An idea, put forth by an American author, is to use artificial intelligence to fill in parts of a story, an email or other document when a writer is searching for the best way to express him or herself. Programs that use neural networks (machines modeled after the brain) or so-called deep learning may be especially useful, Robin Sloan, the author of "Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore" (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012), said here at the Real Future Fair yesterday (Nov. 15). [Super-Intelligent Machines: 7 Robotic Futures]
"It turns out you can train a neural network on a big body of text," Sloan said. "It can be Wikipedia; it can be all the works of Charles Dickens; it could be all of the Internet." https://www.livescience.com/56887-sci-fi-writing-robot-produces-inspiration.html
