Japanese AI Writes Critically Acclaimed Short Story

With the invention of the e-Reader we have all resigned ourselves to the fact that the future of reading is inextricably intertwined with technology. Of course the paper book will never completely disappear but as e-Readers evolve and paper becomes viewed as less ecologically sound more and more people will turn to tablet style libraries for their reading fixes.

But what about the authors?

The Hoshi Shinichi Literary Award is a prestigious Japanese literary award that actively encourages entries from non human writers and this year they had one entry that stood out from the rest. The short story written by an Artificial Intelligence programme developed by Researchers Future University Hakodate made the final cut and although it didn’t win, it did receive critical acclaim from the judges.

However it is not time to panic just yet as the bulk of the work involved in ‘writing’ the story was performed by humans who provided the characters and even the sentences that the AI then put together in order to create the completed story. It seems our precious human authors are safe for now.

The title of the tale that the AI wrote is “The day a computer writes a novel” (Konpyuta ga shosetsu wo kaku hi) and it tells the story an AI that becomes aware of its flourishing talents as a writer, and decides that it no longer needs to serve humanity.

I’m rather curious as to how a story written by an artificial intelligence programme, I wonder if anything of the author’s ‘personality’ shines through into the tale. What do you think?