Ignoring everything they’ve seen throughout the Terminator franchise, a group of Japanese researchers have come up with a computer that writes short stories… and it’s actually produced a piece of work that got through the first round of a literary competition.
AI-written novel passes literary prize screening
Creative writing as a manufactured commodity – that’s a scary thought, but perhaps it’s inevitable. Companies love automation: feed a few instructions in one end and get a finished product out of the other. It’s always been a popular notion that there are only a handful of stories and that everything written is a variation on those; if that’s true then why can’t a machine just write a half decent story?
Classic Neil Gaiman: the everyday blended with the bloody weird. The Ocean at the End of the Lane could be a fairy story, maybe even a children’s story, but the sinister overtones and the occasional adult theme might possibly tip things over into the adult category… maybe. It’s a very simple story, about a young boy living in Sussex as part of a fairly standard nuclear family. His life isn’t all that exciting: he’s a bookish outcast at school and his only real friend is Lettie, the supernatural being who is as old as the universe and happens to live on a farm close to his house…