Can a robot write books? Yes, and they're absolutely terrible.

[wong]

I think you look into too much the word "book".

The books you're thinking is a type of content. But if you look at book as a delivery technology (a stack of paper together) then its perfectly reasonable to have generated books, just like you have generated pdf reports with generated charts and graphs.

To make the kind of book you and I think of as content (novels, investigative journalism, etc...) using a pure AI/machine approach is still a bit away.

Personally, I'm experimenting AI + human solution to create the kind of books most people would want to read.

You are probably referring to this man.

"Philip M. Parker (born June 20, 1960) holds the INSEAD Chair Professorship of Management Science at INSEAD (Fontainebleau, France). He has patented a method to automatically produce a set of similar books from a template which is filled with data from database and internet searches.[1] At Amazon.com, Parker is listed as the author of 107,000 books that his program created and overall he claims to have produced 200,000 different titles.[2][3] This would make him one of the most prolific authors in the world. Parker publishes the automated books through ICON Group International, using several ICON group subheadings. Via EdgeMaven Media, he also provides applications for firms from different business domains to create their own computer-authored content material.[4][5]"

See: * http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/14/business/media/14link.html... * http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_M._Parker

[klenwell]

The New York Times ran a more detailed story a few years ago about a computer programmer somewhere in Southern California who had thousands of titles on Amazon written by a Perl script. As that article explained, certain large libraries buy just about any title published. It was effectively a scam to get these institutions to pony up a couple hundred dollars each for bound copies of Wikipedia copypasta.

[hugh3]

I, too, was hoping this article would be about The Policeman's Beard Is Half Constructed.

It has, however, filled me with a desire to write a script that writes novels (which I could then sell on Amazon). Perhaps I'll do that for this year's NaNoWriMo.

[theatraine]

These are relatively simple programs, which should be easy to stop. More concerning is the usage of computer programs that compose original material. Using learning techniques, researchers have written programs capable of creating original cs papers from a given corpus (ie SCIgen, and other techniques). How long until we see junk books created by these more intelligent (and much harder to detect) algorithms?

[noonespecial]

http://xkcd.com/810/

[derleth]

You know, in this case 'harder to detect' means 'can write reasonably well'. What's the problem with getting reasonably well-written books that happen to have been written by a program? We already get reasonably well-written books that happen to have been written by ghost writers all the time, and nobody claims it's fraudulent that the person named on the cover didn't write the thing.

[cleverjake]

A much more interesting story (that you can also buy on amazon) is The Policeman's beard is half constructed. A book of short form literature and poems written by AI in the 80s. http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0446380512/

[sp332]

RACTER was a hoax. It was basically a fill-in-the-blanks program using templates that the author, William Chamberlain, fed it. https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/RACTER

[For_Iconoclasm]

I worked on a natural language processing project as my required directed study in college. We focused on language generation and took an extremely naïve approach to the problem since it turns out that literature on alternative types of language generation (as opposed to simple generation from n-grams) is not well-proliferated.

Needless to say, it was very hard. Semantic representation by itself is very difficult to tackle; AI in general far off from simulating the wit and ingenuity of a human being's writing, though I don't believe it will be like that forever.

For the curious: we didn't get very far into the project, but our next move was going to be trying to combine WordNet, FrameNet, and VerbNet to create stories that sounded like they described something plausible. We only got a bit past "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously," though.

It's something that I say I want to hack on again someday, but I don't know if I will. The two of us have other code projects right now.

[uniclaude]

Not that your comment is wrong in any manner but I must admit that I cannot understand its relationship with the article.

[burgerbrain]

1) old news.

2) give it time...