Amazon and 'big data'-driven fiction

[astuffedshirt_perv]

An interesting read about how Amazon is using the data it collects from kindle and goodreads and audible to drive fiction. A tidbit:

'All that power comes with great data, which Amazon’s publishing arm is well positioned to exploit in the interest of making books tailored exactly to what people want—down to which page characters should meet on or how many lines of dialogue they should exchange."


Amazon has everything it needs to make massively popular algorithm-driven fiction

 

[Hypoxia]

AI's will write future fiction. Human authors will need to find real jobs. Pest control, maybe.

 

[LupusDei]

AI's will write future fiction. Human authors will need to find real jobs. Pest control, maybe.

Nope, I believe it is more like the painting vs photography art debate. And today, photography is still considered art, even when nearly anyone have a camera in their cellphones and take uncountable amount of pictures most of with are never reviewed more than once if at all.

Fine tuning machine algorithm for writing stories still will be a human job, and will require great expertise. Then, masses could buy or download for free a fine tuned algorithm and feed their own plot points, descriptions, kinks, as little or much as they want to it. Different brand author released algorithms will produce different stories from that, basically generate a personalised version of a famous work. (And by all probability, some of those may, and will become massively popular on their own right.) But to become a brand name author capable of selling story generating algorithms, one will probably still need to write a surprising and successful work, (mostly) the old fashioned way. It isn't saying however, than that too won't benefit from the statistical analysis, if only to go against it for a desired effect. Even if it might become a game to jump a new trend in its infancy.

It will be tool that will make some aspects of writing easier, probably trivially so, but creativity will still be highly desired, if even it sometimes might consist just in recognising possibly most successful combinations of random elements in iterations of automated generator.

P.S. I will much more be concerned about the "real jobs" get lost to the ongoing, and next technological "revolution." At the end, human interaction, in all forms, will be the last thing that remain really requiring human input. And that includes, if not consist entirely of, all forms of art, from industrial design to literature.

 

[Bramblethorn]

https://roalddahl.fandom.com/wiki/The_Great_Automatic_Grammatizator_(short_story)

 

[LupusDei]

https://roalddahl.fandom.com/wiki/The_Great_Automatic_Grammatizator_(short_story)

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[Oblimo]

Machine learning will never produce a novel on its own. Media present machine learning as something it’s not, ie, learning.

 

[Desiremakesmeweak]

"Massively popular algorithm-driven fiction."

Bwaahahahahahahaaaaaaaaaaa.

You mean like the BS spy story in which Sergei Skripal gets poisoned - but lives - by an industrial/military strength nerve poison? Or where Jesus Christ gets BRUTALLY TORTURED, BEATEN AND HACKED ALIVE AND EVENTUALLY KILLED and the Turkish government went back in time (a time travel story! wow, cool) and recorded it all and you can go over there and hear it but you cannot take a copy with you...?

Or where nobody at all got killed in Yemen by the Muslim Brotherhood whose spokesman the JOURNALIST Jamal Khashoggi was made a saint and a martyr along with Princess Di?

You mean that kind of thing?

Or d'you mean where Theresa May fulfills the Brexit will of the people.

Or where all the street people vote Democrat because they love progressives and the liberal Left and are anti-Nazi and because the Democrats are simply 'massively popular?'

Or where people actually buy newspapers like the NYT by choice from all the many other competing newspapers?

 

[Desiremakesmeweak]

Or how about for the TD syndrome people: 'the time when Jim Acosta just tried to get answers that he wanted about why the Mueller crap is taking so long proving with evidence about how the Russians colluded with the street people in LA to arrange voter fraud in favor of the Dems, especially since everyone already knows how Trump and his people colluded with the Russians to be Nazis who hate blacks and Eskimos and Global Warming and Scientists and Vax companies and the unelected Eu-crooks and Muslims except not Moh. Bone Saw Muslim.'

 

[LoquiSordidaAdMe]

It seems to me that machine learning might be incredibly effective at taking what has come before and distilling down a successful formula for creating more of the same. And there will certainly be a market for that. A machine may even extrapolate current trends to refresh its formulas and stay ahead of a curve.

But I don't think a machine will ever create something completely new and unexpected. No matter how successful a formula is, people ultimately get bored with formulaic fiction and seek something new and different. I think it will always be up to the human brain to make that kind of creative leap.

Machines may put the formulaic, mass-market hack writers out of work. But the artists, the creative and inventive risk-takers who choose to push boundaries and test limits, those folks will still be sought out. They may not make money. Their genius may be quickly absorbed into the next iteration of the formula. But there will still be a place for the them.

 

[Bramblethorn]

404

Fixed, thanks. This forum has a way of mangling links.

 

[Bramblethorn]

Machine learning will never produce a novel on its own. Media present machine learning as something it’s not, ie, learning.

I try to avoid saying "never", but yeah, we're a LONG way off being able to auto-write a novel that passes the Turing test.

 

[Hypoxia]

I try to avoid saying "never", but yeah, we're a LONG way off being able to auto-write a novel that passes the Turing test.

Just wait till AI's learn to plagiarize. Like Shakespeare did.