Could A.I. robots take over the writing industry? In terrifying news, it seems that A.I. writing technology may replace the writers of tomorrow. Researchers from Future University created the A.I. and helped to get it accepted into a national literary competition where one of it's short form stories make it past the first round. (via Future University)
It's not just laborious jobs anymore. The robotic takeover continues - as an A.l. program co-authors a book that actually passes through the first round of a national literary competition! It seems that engineers and scientists are set on making humans obsolete by trying to prove that computers can beat us at our own game. However, while such claims sound amazing and futuristic, the actuality is that the A.I. wasn’t capable of writing the entire book itself without help from good-old humans.
Also, who’s to say what the qualifications for the first round were… We do know that 11 of the 1,450 submissions to the Nikkei Hoshi Shinichi Literary Award competition were non-human entries. Out of these, two were submitted by the A.I. and its team led by Hitoshi Matsubara. Out of these entries, only one passed the first round. Hence, Matsubara’s A.I. is definitely one of the better literary A.I.s out there, but still not enough to out-write humans.
Hitoshi Matsubara and his team are from the Future University of Hakodate, and they are very pleased, by their work; considering this is the first time an A.I. has passed the first round of this national competition. However, even Matsubara notes that the A.I. needs future work to successfully write character descriptions without sounding like… well, a bot.
The competition was for short stories and its passable entry was titled, “The Day A Computer Writes A Novel.” In order to ‘write’ this novel, Matsubara first needed to select words, select sentences, and set parameters for the A.I. to follow suit and chug out a short story. Hence, the effort is co-authored because Matsubara needed to get the ball rolling.
The story itself seems whimsical, judging by following line, “The day a computer wrote a novel. The computer, placing priority on the pursuit of its own joy, stopped working for humans.”
However, just how probably is it that A.I. technology will replace writers altogether? Is such a thing really progress, or just the beginning of the next dark ages for humanity?
The reality is that it is already happening! Particularly within the field of Sports reporting, Fox and Yahoo! have been using bots to auto-generate sports recaps and fantasy reports. Bots are also being used by companies like, The Associated Press, to generate earnings reports. Automated Insights also released a ‘Wordsmith’ program to auto-generate stories, and there are tons of similar programs popping up everywhere.
However, they all currently have one thing in common: while they can churn out facts and figures with enough success to fool humans, they haven’t been able to successful write fiction better than us: Humans-1, Robots-1.
While this A.I. was able to pass the very first screening of this literary competition, it was not able to out-write over a thousand other humans who possess the quality of creativity that computers currently do not have and cannot mimic. Creativity within A.I. is currently based around a series of rules, structures, and parameters. This means that they cannot think outside the box, or outside the code – at least not yet. So for now, we can all cling to a false sense of job security until scientists develop the next gen that makes even more jobs obsolete.
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