fling93 loves fishies

Everyone Thinks They're a Writer

Well, I’m still writing away at the novel, although I’ve only now hit the halfway point, 25,000 words, with only one week left to go. So I’ll probably not make the wordcount goal. Which means I might as well blog. :)

And while I’m on the topic of writing novels, via Brayden King, I ran across an interesting article in the New York Times about the progress being made on computer programs who can write.

…computers have started writing without us scribes. They are perfectly capable of nonfiction prose, and … can even generate brief outbursts of fiction that are probably superior to what many humans could turn out…. Consider the beginning of a short story dealing with the theme of betrayal:

“Dave Striver loved the university — its ivy-covered clocktowers, its ancient and sturdy brick, and its sun-splashed verdant greens and eager youth. The university, contrary to popular opinion, is far from free of the stark unforgiving trials of the business world: academia has its own tests, and some are as merciless as any in the marketplace. A prime example is the dissertation defense: to earn the Ph.D., to become a doctor, one must pass an oral examination on one’s dissertation. This was a test Professor Edward Hart enjoyed giving.”

That pregnant opening paragraph was written by a computer program known as Brutus.1 that was developed by Selmer Bringsjord, a computer scientist at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and David A. Ferrucci, a researcher at I.B.M.

Or consider this sensitive reinterpretation of a literary classic:

“The road to grandmother’s house led through the dark forest, but Little Red Riding Hood was not afraid and she went on as happy as a lark. The birds sang her their sweetest songs while the squirrels ran up and down the tall trees. Now and then, a rabbit would cross her path.”

What you just read is the work of StoryBook, “an end-to-end narrative prose generation system that utilizes narrative planning, sentence planning, a discourse history, lexical choice, revision, a full-scale lexicon and the well-known Fuf/Surge surface realizer.” Believe it or not, that description was written not by a computer but by the humans who created StoryBook, Charles B. Callaway and James C. Lester, who are computer scientists.

Okay, I’m not exactly feeling threatened (not that I should, since I don’t get paid to write), but I’ll say that this is a lot further along than I’d expected.

Still, as Brayden King remarks:

The problem with computer generated fiction is that, while it may flow logically, it lacks that human touch of unexpectedness that makes fiction genuinely interesting. Perhaps this is why computers are much better suited to writing non-fiction.

Anybody who enjoys hearing a human drummer over a drum machine knows exactly what he’s talking about. There is a richness present in the slight variances from perfection and logic, and it is not something easily duplicated by machines. This doesn’t mean machines won’t ever be able to at least simulate this someday, but if you were a writer or an artist, I wouldn’t be worried anytime soon.

I think what we’ll more likely see soon is some really good tools for writers. For example, a software program that can keep track of all of your characters so you can quickly bring up dialog samples and whatnot of a particular character, so you can easily keep them consistent and depict more realistic character development. Or something that helps you build and edit a plot and subplot tree, and point out which passages you’ll need to edit if you make a significant plot change. Perhaps tools like these are already out there, but I don’t know of anybody who uses them so they’re probably not all that good. But regardless, I’d expect computers to be able to write software programs long before they can actually create art (oh wait, that should make me worried).

What is really scary is, as Dan Drezner points out “what happens when policy wonks write novels with… shudder… sex scenes.” From an Alex Beam article in the Sunday Boston Globe:

Former Kennedy School dean Joseph Nye usually writes the kind of books discussed earnestly at policy forums and perused by index-skimming colleagues killing time at university bookstores. But no more! In his just-published novel, “The Power Game” (“a taut but sensitive political thriller” — Tina Brown), Nye reaches out for a whole new audience. Here protagonist Peter Cutler, the proverbial “high State Department official,” engages in some ill-advised personal diplomacy with the alluring Alexa Byrnes, herself a policy playa at the Department of Defense. Cutler is married, albeit not to Ms. Byrnes:

Alexa led me to the bed in the middle of the enormous room and pulled me down beside her. I kissed her breasts and ran my hand between her thighs. She gripped my shoulders tightly. Unlike the first time I made love to Alexa, when the ecstasy had been eroded by a sense of anxiety and uncertainty, I was sucked into this moment as quickly and completely as if I had placed my feet in quicksand. Memories from years ago blended with intense physical excitement in a driving, pounding torrent of passion.

Um, okay. I’m a little bit wonkish myself, but hopefully I’m not that bad. But even scarier is Drezner’s own example of how he, an international relations theory wonk, would write such a passage (I wonder if he’s a Mellencamp fan):

Diane had longed to bandwagon with Jack since their first year in grad school. In their own prisoner’s dilemma, she now knew that she wanted more than just tit-for-tat — she had to have Jack’s grim trigger. This wasn’t just a one-shot interaction for her. She wanted repeated play — with very little discounting.

It was taboo as a realist not to prefer balancing. If word got out, her reputation among the guns & bombs crowd would be ruined. But Jack’s social constructivism was too seductive for her feeble rationalist defenses.

“Oh… Jack,” she whispered into his ear, “I give in — reconstitute my identity!”

He smiled and slowly began his discourse….

Afterwards, she turned to him and purred, “Now that’s what I call utility maximization.” He laughed.

Then her tone changed. “Seriously, I’ve never had such a shared meaning with anyone before. It was so…. intersubjective.”

AIIIIEEEE!! Run away! Run away!

Actually, I do seem to have quite a few sex scenes in my novel which are sadly not nearly as good as this. I wonder if it’s acceptable noveling etiquette to just quote this passage and trackback ping it from the book?