Novels created by AI

As usual, the guy stood beside me. He is K, a new member.

“Did you hear the news yesterday?”

　

“About what?”

“About jobs for humans being reduced as cheap and smart human-like robots are replacing them in factories.”

　

It is an excerpt from a short novel “My job.” What surprises us is that the novel was written by AI. The novel was co-authored with a human writer, and passed the initial screening of the Hoshi Shinichi Award, a Japanese Sci-fi novel contest.

The research team led by Hitoshi Matsubara, chairperson of the Japanese Society for Artificial Intelligence and a professor at Future University Hakodate, revealed at the press conference in Tokyo that some of the four short-stories submitted at the awards passed the screening. The stories submitted were “My Job,” “The day computer writes a novel,” and others, and were submitted under anonymous name. The total number of submission was more than 1,400.

The research team has been conducting a study since 2012 on making AI create short stories (less than 4,000 characters) based on novels by famous Japanese sci-fi writer Shinichi Hoshi. They made the computer learn the characteristics of around 1,000 stories by Hoshi after analyzing the types of words used, sentence lengths, plotting, etc. Furthermore, they trained the computer to create new stories by comparing different plot structures of each novel.

The stories were created in coordination with humans and the computer, humans setting up the plots, characters, sex of the characters, etc., and the AI writing the sentences by choosing appropriate words and paragraphs. Professor Matsubara explained, "This time our goal was to create sensible storylines with correct sentences.” Satoshi Hase, a sci-fi writer, said that he was surprised by the content of the stories while they had weak character-building.

The next step will be about strengthening the emotional part, such as foreshadowing and character building. The research team set their goal to make the robot write stories without help from people in two years. “So far AI was mostly used to solving problems with obvious answers such as Go or Chess games, but I aspire to expand the scope with human creativity,” said Dr. Matsubara.

도쿄=서영아특파원 sya@donga.com