Artificial intelligence takes over fiction writing too

The first game mastered by a computer was noughts and crosses (also known as tic-tac-toe) in 1952. In 1997, IBM’s Deep Blue, beat the reigning chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov. There was some controversy around the match, but, after the event, Kasparov realized that he might have performed better if he’d had, as Deep Blue did, the same instant access to a massive database of all previous chess moves. To pursue this idea, Kasparov pioneered the concept of man-plus-machine matches, in which AI augments human chess players rather than competes against them. It was called “advanced chess”, then “cyborg chess” and “centaur chess.”

It turned out that combination human+computer (called “centaur”) requires different set of skills. In June 1998, Kasparov played against Veselin Topalov, a top-rated grandmaster. Each used a regular computer with off-the-shelf chess software and databases of hundreds of thousands of chess games, including some the best ever played. Kasparov found the experience “as disturbing as it was exciting.” It was, he realized, like learning to be a race-car driver. Topalov, as it turns out, appeared to be a better Formula One “thinker”. On purely human terms, Kasparov was a stronger player; a month before, he’d trounced Topalov 4–0. But the centaur play evened the odds. This time, Topalov fought Kasparov to a 3–3 draw.

In 2005, there was a “freestyle” chess tournament in which a team could consist of any number of humans or computers, in any combination. Many teams consisted of chess grandmasters, achieving chess scores of 2,500 (out of 3,000). But the winning team consisted of two young New England men, Steven Cramton and Zackary Stephen (who were comparative amateurs, with chess rankings down around 1,400 to 1,700), and their computers.

Their victory was quite a shock but it proved that humans playing alongside machines are the strongest chess-playing entities possible. And, true, in the championship in 2014, open to all modes of players, pure chess AI engines won 42 games but centaurs won 53 games. Today the best chess player alive is a centaur: Intagrand, a British team of humans and several different chess programs.

The next frontier was Go. Nobody believed it was possible to create a program playing Go on the world champion level in the next ten years. And yet, a month ago, on March 15, 2016, computer AlphaGo won four of the five games against the best Go player of the past decade Lee. Commentators noted that AlphaGo played many unprecedented, creative, and even “beautiful” moves. AlphaGo’s bold move 37 in Game 2 had a 1 in 10,000 chance of being played by a human. Lee countered with а similar move in Game 4 (1 in 10,000), which he won.

A team of technologists working with Microsoft and others have produced a painting in the style of Dutch master Rembrandt. A new work was designed to look as much like a Rembrandt as possible, while remaining an original portrait. The computer was asked to produce a portrait of a Caucasian male between the ages of 30 and 40, with facial hair, wearing black clothes with a white collar and a hat, facing to the right. It was then 3D-printed to give it the same texture as an oil painting. I highly recommend to see the short movie and browse the images on the project site.

One of the first computer-generated works of fiction “True Love” was printed in 2008. It was the work of a computer program and a team of IT specialists. The 320-page novel is a variation of Leo Tolstoy’s “Anna Karenina”, but worded in the style of a Japanese author called Haruki Murakami. Here is an extract: “Kitty couldn’t fall asleep for a long time. Her nerves were strained as two tight strings, and even a glass of hot wine, that Vronsky made her drink, did not help her. Lying in bed she kept going over and over that monstrous scene at the meadow.“

Judges for а literary award of 2016 in Japan weren’t told which novels were written by humans and which were penned by human-computer teams. One of four books co-written by an AI program made it past the first stage of the contest. The level of human involvement in the novels was about 80%, one of the professors who worked on the project said.

Humans decided the plot and character details of the novel, then entered words and phrases from an existing novel into a computer, which was able to construct a new book using that information.

One of the submitted books is titled “The Day a Computer Writes a Novel,” which ends with the sentences: “I writhed with joy, which I experienced for the first time, and kept writing with excitement. The day a computer wrote a novel. The computer, placing priority on the pursuit of its own joy, stopped working for humans.” (Note, please, it is translation from Japanese.)

Creativity is hard to emulate inside a computer, but it’s surely only a matter of time before AI programs have the intelligence and the data to be able to do a passable job: automated software is already responsible for writing certain financial and sports reports where the key facts can be arranged in a straightforward template.

Political speeches are another target for up-and-coming robot writers, as they tend to follow a familiar pattern, with repeated phrases and topics.

Observing all this development, I am contemplating the idea of not writing myself any more, but work more on machine learning programming instead, so I can eventually create a program (or be part of the team of authors) that will write the next great American novel.