[Newspoetry] NYTimes.com Article: An Essay: Computers as Authors? Literary Luddites Unite!

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Oh, Wonders will never cease-saw say I who right the Machines from crooked ways that run straight until they turn, predictably, once the style is in the season-the firm in the formulation-the path in the perambulation.

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An Essay: Computers as Authors? Literary Luddites Unite!

November 22, 2004
 By DANIEL AKST 



 

For some people, writing a novel is a satisfying exercise
in self-expression. For me, it's a hideous blend of
psychoanalysis and cannibalism that is barely potent enough
to overcome a series of towering avoidance mechanisms -
including my own computer. Writers and computers nowadays
are locked in such an enduringly dysfunctional embrace that
it can be hard to tell us apart. We both rely heavily on
memory, for instance. We are both calculating, complex and
crash-prone. And like Hebrew National hot dogs, we both
seem to answer to a higher power: writers, according to
Plato, were divinely inspired; computers have Bill Gates. 

Occasionally you hear of a Luddite novelist who shuns
computers, but the truth is that most of us would be lost
without them. If I rail and curse at mine, it is partly out
of resentment at our miserable co-dependence. Imagine,
then, the blow to my scribbler's vanity when I discovered a
while back that computers might get along just fine without
writers. 

This is not science fiction. With little fanfare and (so
far) no appearances at Barnes & Noble, computers have
started writing without us scribes. They are perfectly
capable of nonfiction prose, and while the reputation of
Henry James is not yet threatened, computers can even
generate brief outbursts of fiction that are probably
superior to what many humans could turn out - even those
not in master of fine arts programs. Consider the beginning
of a short story dealing with the theme of betrayal: 

"Dave Striver loved the university - its ivy-covered
clocktowers, its ancient and sturdy brick, and its
sun-splashed verdant greens and eager youth. The
university, contrary to popular opinion, is far from free
of the stark unforgiving trials of the business world:
academia has its own tests, and some are as merciless as
any in the marketplace. A prime example is the dissertation
defense: to earn the Ph.D., to become a doctor, one must
pass an oral examination on one's dissertation. This was a
test Professor Edward Hart enjoyed giving." 

That pregnant opening paragraph was written by a computer
program known as Brutus.1 that was developed by Selmer
Bringsjord, a computer scientist at Rensselaer Polytechnic
Institute, and David A. Ferrucci, a researcher at I.B.M. 

Or consider this sensitive reinterpretation of a literary
classic: 

"The road to grandmother's house led through the dark
forest, but Little Red Riding Hood was not afraid and she
went on as happy as a lark. The birds sang her their
sweetest songs while the squirrels ran up and down the tall
trees. Now and then, a rabbit would cross her path." 

What you just read is the work of StoryBook, "an end-to-end
narrative prose generation system that utilizes narrative
planning, sentence planning, a discourse history, lexical
choice, revision, a full-scale lexicon and the well-known
Fuf/Surge surface realizer." Believe it or not, that
description was written not by a computer but by the humans
who created StoryBook, Charles B. Callaway and James C.
Lester, who are computer scientists. 

That no computer has yet written the Great American Novel
may be because computers are subject to some of the same
handicaps that afflict human writers. First, writing is
hard! Although computers can work unhindered by free will,
bourbon or divorce, such advantages are outweighed by a
lack of life experience or emotions. Second, and all too
familiar to living writers of fiction, there is no money in
it. Unable to teach creative writing or marry rich,
computers have to depend on research grants. And why would
anyone pay for a computer to do something that humans can
still do better for peanuts? 

Still, what has been accomplished so far is scary enough,
and surely there is more to come, thanks to rapid advances
in computing power and the rise of "narratology" (how
stories are told) as an academic field of study, among
other unwholesome trends that are making the novelist's
life ever more perilous. 

Computers have been doing literary work for a while now -
helping nab plagiarists, for instance - and there is even
fiction-writing software for people to use, in one case
complete "with 2,363 narrative situations." Professor
Bringsjord meanwhile is working on a logical framework for
the problem of evil, hoping a computer can write fiction on
that theme next. It is hard not to worry that sooner or
later computers will be monopolizing the best-seller lists
rather than focusing on such worthwhile goals as producing
an intelligible royalty statement. 

Fortunately, flesh-and-blood writers are nowhere near
having to hang up their turtlenecks. When I called Steven
Pinker, the Harvard University psychologist whose research
focuses on language and cognition, he pointed out that the
human brain consists of 100 trillion synapses that are
subjected to a lifetime of real-world experience. While it
is conceivable that computers will eventually write novels,
Dr. Pinker says, "I doubt they'd be very good novels by
human standards." 

If we don't get much good fiction out of computers, we may
at least gain some wholesome new perspective on the process
of creating literature. The advent of storytelling
computers suggests that thinking people and thinking
machines confront many of the same problems in writing
fiction, even if their solutions are different. Computers
have to rely on a rigorous system of logic, while human
writers try to turn their disorganized natures to
advantage. Our traditional emphasis on inspiration promotes
a reliance on serendipity, which, in turn, helps dampen the
potentially paralyzing awareness of the infinite choices
available when you create a fictional world. 

The economist Herbert Simon, who reminded us of the
futility of trying to consider every possible alternative
in a world without end, might have had in mind the budding
novelist in Albert Camus's "Plague," determined to create a
perfect first sentence and therefore unable to advance
beyond it. 

It was Simon's ideas - particularly his notion of
"satisficing" - that first got me interested in
fiction-writing machines. Though in theory a person
shopping for new shoes could consider all the pairs on the
planet, in fact, the cost is way too high - an entire life
spent shoe-shopping. So in the real world we visit one or
two stores, try on a few in our size and buy a pair. 

Satisficing in this way - settling, or even sensing, what
is good enough - is something novelists must do as well. We
think of an idea and go with it because pausing to
systematically consider every plot twist, character or
phrase that might come next would lead nowhere. 

Computers are just as subject as humans to Simon's "bounded
rationality." Computers cannot create narratives by using
brute computational force to mindlessly try every
alternative. It may be fun to think that 10,000 monkeys
typing for 10,000 years will sooner or later randomly
produce "Paradise Lost," but evidently this is no more
plausible for silicon than simians. Computers don't even
play chess this way, Dr. Pinker told me, having noted
elsewhere that the number of possible sentences of 20 words
or less that the average person can understand is perhaps a
hundred million trillion, or many times the number of
seconds since the universe was born. "The possibilities
boggle the mind very quickly," he says. 

This doesn't mean nobody is trying. On the Internet, the
Monkey Shakespeare Simulator
(http://user.tninet.se/~ecf599g/aardasnails/java/Monkey/webpages/) generates random keystrokes and matches them against
a database of Shakespeare's plays. The record, last time I
looked, was 21 consecutive letters and spaces from - aptly
enough - "Love's Labour's Lost." 

Daniel Akst's novels include "The Webster Chronicle"
(Penguin) and "St. Burl's Obituary" (Harcourt). 



http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/22/books/22fict.html?ex=1102151862&ei=1&en=33801b2a1fd2a024


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