Computer-generated fiction might seem a tipping point for artificial intelligence, but it could help us to understand the world we live inIn 1983, William Chamberlain and Thomas Etter released a book called The Policeman’s Beard Is Half Constructed, described as the “early fiction” of a computer program called Racter. In July 2015, the Neukom Institute for Computational Science at Dartmouth College announced a “Turing test in creativity”, the first short story prize for algorithms. Just as science fiction is always and inevitably a critique of the contemporary, so the question of machine intelligence and literature is also a question of human intelligence and literature.Even more than the ability to hold a conversation, the basis of the original Turing test, the ability to write fiction seems like a tipping point for artificial intelligence, albeit perhaps a distant one. Algorithms write non-fiction all the time, of course. The Associated Press employs a company called Narrative Science to create short news reports from raw data, based on the same templating process Racter used. More advanced software is working on longer pieces. So in one sense, the Turing test for language has already been passed. The real question for fiction is: how might it be useful? Continue reading... Continue reading at 'The Guardian'
[ The Guardian | 2015-08-10 00:00:00 UTC ]