Bots writing stories?

There is an article getting some traction online titled Something is Wrong on the internet.

Several years ago, a t-shirt seller on Amazon was lynched by an on-line mob when his random t-shirt suggestion bot came up with ‘keep calm and rape on’. Today, the author says YouTube Kids is being populated by videos generated by bots, some videos being quite disturbing.

To my simple mind, it seems that a bot writing erotica would be vastly simpler. Now I love me some silkstockinglover. Take her library, dump it into a bot, and it should be able to spew out endless streams of derivative porn. Seems like it could even be monetized via Amazon sales. So why don’t we have bot writers taking over?

Some of my stories have been stolen by bot web crawlers to provide content for malware infested sites.

Typically they take only the first page, including my copyright notice. They mix it with other stolen content to produce rubbish - but it is content that will appear in searches.

No, I'm not talking about a bot copying someone's work. I'm talking about a bot creating a story in the style of an author. Bots actually combing words in new and unique ways to make an original story.

You can read bot porn on kindle. It's not pretty.

astuffedshirt_perv said:

No, I'm not talking about a bot copying someone's work. I'm talking about a bot creating a story in the style of an author. Bots actually combing words in new and unique ways to make an original story.

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I'd love to see a bot create something Shakespearean

That is a long read. While it is disturbing that algorithm-based programs are able to churn out "creative" content, all the examples in the article are aimed at children. The resulting content appears simple and repetitive. There is a lot of variety in the examples, but only because so many unique programs are each creating repetitive content.

These bot generated videos seem to work on a plug-and-play template logic. ie: Use search metrics to identify a category of things children like; plug an instance of that category into slot A. Identify another thing children like; plug it into slot B. Export a video and upload it with the title "B Has Fun With A." Maybe the template has a hundred or a thousand slots, but that's the basic idea.

While erotic fiction isn't necessarily known for it's complex plots, it's not quite as simple as a fill-in-the-blank template. And the better class of fiction on Literotica can really be top notch.

Some of the AI and machine learning algorithms I've been reading about might make human writers obsolete someday, but we're not there yet.

LoquiSordidaAdMe said:

That is a long read. While it is disturbing that algorithm-based programs are able to churn out "creative" content, all the examples in the article are aimed at children. The resulting content appears simple and repetitive. There is a lot of variety in the examples, but only because so many unique programs are each creating repetitive content.

These bot generated videos seem to work on a plug-and-play template logic. ie: Use search metrics to identify a category of things children like; plug an instance of that category into slot A. Identify another thing children like; plug it into slot B. Export a video and upload it with the title "B Has Fun With A." Maybe the template has a hundred or a thousand slots, but that's the basic idea.

While erotic fiction isn't necessarily known for it's complex plots, it's not quite as simple as a fill-in-the-blank template. And the better class of fiction on Literotica can really be top notch.

Some of the AI and machine learning algorithms I've been reading about might make human writers obsolete someday, but we're not there yet.

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These things have been around for some time - personalised books for children. They can be a simple wordprocessing program - replace string A with child's name; string B with name of sibling; string C with name of best friend etc.

oggbashan said:

These things have been around for some time - personalised books for children. They can be a simple wordprocessing program - replace string A with child's name; string B with name of sibling; string C with name of best friend etc.

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Yes they have. I first saw such a thing in the 80s. It needed a parent to fill out a paper form, and then a data entry operator to type the variables into the computer.

The point of the article is that these bots are now being used to produce videos not text, they are producing hundreds of them, and they are filling in the blanks by themselves without a human being.

http://www.elsewhere.org/pomo/

This site has been around for years, auto-generating pretentious drivel for students who can't be bothered writing their own essays.

Known as the 'Post-Modernist Essay Generator', it's by no means the only one around nowadays. Over the years I've had quite a bit of fun by submitting text from these essays to my boss and waiting for his reaction.

Bray123 said:

http://www.elsewhere.org/pomo/

This site has been around for years, auto-generating pretentious drivel for students who can't be bothered writing their own essays.

Known as the 'Post-Modernist Essay Generator', it's by no means the only one around nowadays. Over the years I've had quite a bit of fun by submitting text from these essays to my boss and waiting for his reaction.

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see also: http://news.mit.edu/2015/how-three-mit-students-fooled-scientific-journals-0414

Bray123 said:

http://www.elsewhere.org/pomo/

This site has been around for years, auto-generating pretentious drivel for students who can't be bothered writing their own essays.

Known as the 'Post-Modernist Essay Generator', it's by no means the only one around nowadays. Over the years I've had quite a bit of fun by submitting text from these essays to my boss and waiting for his reaction.

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"The Futility of Class: Presemanticist theory in the works of Lynch"
Was that really English ? I don't think I understood more than one word in three.

Handley_Page said:

I'd love to see a bot create something Shakespearean

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Infinite monkeys, infinite typewriters, and all that.

PervOtaku said:

Infinite monkeys, infinite typewriters, and all that.

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Hey now! How'd I get brought into this?

Well, only one monkey and one typewriter, but infinite tries....

In all seriousness, (and keep in mind I'm a sci-fi nut of long standing) while the idea is appealing, I don't think we are close to computer generated erotica without a human interface for one very simple reason. A computer can't feel or understand why it should. Even if that feeling is the "simpler" arousal. Therefore, there's going to have to be a lot more study before we see computer programs stirring the emotions of the masses. (Modern newspapers notwithstanding.)

(And I for one am just as glad! I've SEEN "Terminator", "Terminator II",... "Terminator; The Return of Jason". "Electric Dreams." )

The science of writing, the mathematical input of words on a page according to their definition strung together within the framework of grammatical rules, certainly. I think a computer can manage that, if not now, soon. (Probably far better than I!) But, being able to do so in such a way that engages the feels such as SilkStockingLover or Shakes-his-spear or, God help us, Chaucer or Tolstoy... No, I just don't see the feasibility of that. (Not without risking violating the three laws!)

Meanwhile, I guess those of us masochistic enough will continue to suffer under the whips of our muses. And dream of a simpler time when we can hook our computers directly to our brains.

AI is doing a long overdue service to humanity: puncturing our obscenely distended pustule of hubris.

Well, looks like there getting closer: He began to eat Hermione's family': bot tries to write Harry Potter book – and fails in magic ways .

After being fed all seven Potter tales, a predictive keyboard has produced a tale that veers from almost genuine to gloriously bonkers. An article from The Guardian.

astuffedshirt_perv said:

Well, looks like there getting closer: He began to eat Hermione's family': bot tries to write Harry Potter book – and fails in magic ways .

After being fed all seven Potter tales, a predictive keyboard has produced a tale that veers from almost genuine to gloriously bonkers. An article from The Guardian.

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That Harry Potter story, created by Botnik, is hilarious. It really is nuts, and very funny.

But it's also a lot better than I would have guessed a Bot could do. It shows that we're not that far off from a program being able to write a story. It may take a lot longer for a program to write something that a human could write, but then again it may happen faster than we think. Computing power and ability is increasing at a faster than linear pace.

My theory, though, is that we don't have to worry about computers replacing us because when we get close to that point we will use computers to enhance our own abilities, instead of sitting back and letting computers replace us. It's hard to know what that will look like.

It's actually pretty hard to train a machine to write a coherent, meaningful story. It's been done - https://www.digitaltrends.com/cool-...passes-first-round-nationanl-literary-prize/- but the issue is that you still need to manually wire up some connection between the idea of a character and its place in the plot, and then connect that character and that plot to the actual words on the page. There's currently not much to go on in the way of datasets for this sort of thing, but if the demand for it comes around, I'm sure we'll see some cool reinforcement learning developments that get machine-generated stories looking more like original human works.

But to what purpose?

sr71plt said:

But to what purpose?

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The only purpose - money. If a publisher can buy/create a software package that can churn out bestsellers indistinguishable from human work, then there are no authors to share profits with. Hope I don't live to see it.

astuffedshirt_perv said:

Well, looks like there getting closer: He began to eat Hermione's family': bot tries to write Harry Potter book – and fails in magic ways .

After being fed all seven Potter tales, a predictive keyboard has produced a tale that veers from almost genuine to gloriously bonkers. An article from The Guardian.

Click to expand...

This story is being spun as "bot writes a Harry Potter story" but from what I can tell, there's still a lot of human involvement there.

As far as I can tell, the automated part is to create predictive text keyboards like this one, based on the Harry Potter books, but human authors then select from those keyboards to write the story.

Note that the Harry Potter page lists twelve "contributors"; from their bios, most of those people are writers rather than programmers. The site's "about" info describes Botnik as "writers, artists and developers collaborating with machines".

Bramblethorn said:

This story is being spun as "bot writes a Harry Potter story" but from what I can tell, there's still a lot of human involvement there.

As far as I can tell, the automated part is to create predictive text keyboards like this one, based on the Harry Potter books, but human authors then select from those keyboards to write the story.

Note that the Harry Potter page lists twelve "contributors"; from their bios, most of those people are writers rather than programmers. The site's "about" info describes Botnik as "writers, artists and developers collaborating with machines".

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I checked it out, and this is correct. The way it works is you can upload the works of different authors in .txt files, and the program will use the words from those files as its vocabulary, and each time you type a word from the given vocabulary it will offer a menu of possible word options for the next word from the vocabulary you've uploaded. So it's not fully automated; it's not as though a bot actually is authoring the story.