Although the collective consciousness speaks that artificial intelligence will have difficulty with creative tasks, a software in Japan has been able to write, with some human help, a novel that has been able to compete for a prize.
Claims about how automated and mostly robot-controlled societies will function are not new. For many years, they have been part of science fiction literature and expert analysis when they talk about future realities. It is usually based on the fact that, as already happened with mechanization, simple jobs will be replaced first in which human thought is not fundamental, to, later, with a great development of artificial intelligence (AI), give way to others where we do provide added value. However, a Japanese AI program has written a novel, which shows the development that already exists today.
The novel is titled “The day a computer writes a novel,” and according to Hitoshi Matsubara’s team, the human part of the work was to select words and phrases, as well as determine some parameters about the narrative and plot before the show began literary production. Two works written with AI were presented, and one of them managed to pass to the next round in a literary contest, without the jury knowing that it had been written practically entirely by a machine.
In other editions of the contest works written with artificial intelligence were already accepted, but it was not until this year that participants believed that the software was ready to compete one-on-one with humans. According to Satoshi Hase, a novelist who was part of the jury, it was a surprise to learn how it had been written, given the good structure of the novel. Although, of course, in the descriptions of characters, for example, there are some problems. For the team, the most difficult thing is to give the software human sensitivity, and that this is perceived in the plot by the readers.
It is not easy, according to them, that the creation of a machine has coherence and is capable of generating stories with which we are able to empathize, as readers who do not know from which “hands” this work comes.
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