Imagine that in a more or less distant future the winner of the Planet Award was a robot. Or that the authorship of the scripts of the most successful series in Spain corresponded to a Japanese software programmed with Artificial Intelligence. The world of literary creation will not be left out of the advances that are already taking place in other sectors more linked to new technologies.
A few months ago, the Chinese publishing house Cheers Publishing posted a poetry – a selection of 139 poems-written through Artificial Intelligence by Microsoft Internet Explorer, with the title “Sunlight lost in the glass window”.
Surely to the poetry lovers do not tell them anything about this title, much less its “author”, but there is no doubt that the cited poetry book open many questions and puts on the table an interesting debate: to what extent a machine and an algorithm have the capacity to creating a literary world, mixing the ingredients previously made available by the human being?
The talent, the imaginative and the creativity from a poet they cannot be transmitted to a robot, even by magic. But, however, the robot can memorize a large volume of informationlike Microsoft Little Ice did. An algorithm was responsible for putting at his service thousands of sonnets belonging to different literary generations. With all this material, the robot was able to generate 10,000 poems, among those who were chosen the 139 that later became part of that book of poetry.
The promoters of the idea later checked –mixing poems written by Artificial Intelligence and others by real authors-which many readers they were not able to discern between them. In fact, only a minority admitted the authorship and participation of a algorithm in that selection of poems.
The next step, to add more feeling to stories – whether in verse or prose -, will find a way to substitute human help with artificial Intelligence programs much more refined and with a previous selection of phrases and words that enrich the contents.
In short, to supply in some way the imaginative ability and sensitivity of humans. According to experts, the key at the moment lies in providing the software of a greater sensitivity… But everything will be gone.
Against the most skeptical, who defend the impossibility that a machine can replace the human mind in the literature, some evidences begin to emerge, which call into question their arguments.
Artificial Intelligence Creations
There are even experiments that show that artificial Intelligence already has someone who writes it. In just a few days, a Russian publisher, Astral Spb, published a novel unrelated to the intervention of a human mind, although previously its “material author” received linguistic resources and narrative tools from thirteen writers, as well as data and profiles of characters, a plot, a time and locations in which the story was located.
Therefore, the dilemma remains how to generate in the machines the capacity of imagination and the sufficient nuances that enrich the soul of the characters. Could we speak of literary creation, if the narrative text is composed of information and extracts that have previously been incorporated into a computer program? Without that previous contribution, we will hardly have a Planet Prize in the future, let alone a Nobel Prize in Literature.
The experience of the human being, its vital circumstances, they can never be comparable to the accumulation of data that a robot can physically absorb. However, that does not mean that the collaboration between machines and people it’s narrowing. And so that, even, they can be achieved really interesting works of fiction.
