As an editor who regularly covers the latest and greatest in product design and new technologies, I often see how artificial intelligence (AI) and robots are making our lives easier. After all, AI is designed to do the thinking for us. Just look at how your smartphone will call your spouse when asked, or look up the closest gas station in your vicinity.
However, as AI progresses, many are concerned that it will begin to make some job skills less valuable. By using statistical patterns in data, computers can learn to improve the productivity of various work processes – such as toll collection on highways, a drive-through window teller, or even someday a taxi driver. Computers may even soon handle routine medical diagnosis.
Thankfully, as a writer, my job is very secure…or so I thought.
Recently, a short-form novel “coauthored” by humans and an AI program passed the first screening process for a national Japanese literary prize. The robot-written novel didn’t win the final prize, but who’s to say this won’t be the case in future competitions?
The Nikkei Hoshi Shinichi Literary Award is named after Hoshi Shinichi, a well-known Japanese science fiction author. According to The Japan News, the award is unique in that it accepts “applicants who are not human beings (AI programs and others).”
Therefore, judges for the prize aren’t informed which novels are written by humans and which are written by human-computer teams. According to one of the professors who worked on the project, the level of human involvement in the novels was about 80 percent.
Essentially, humans decided the plot and character details of the novel and proceeded to enter words and phrases from an existing novel into a computer. Then, the computer did the rest of the work – actually writing the text using the information provided.
Although the novel didn’t win the award, it still impressed science-fiction novelist Satoshi Hase, who said, “I was surprised at the work because it was a well-structured novel. But there are still some problems [to overcome] to win the prize, such as character descriptions.”
Out of about 1,450 submissions received, 11 were written at least partially by non-humans.
The prize committee did not disclose which AI coauthored entry advanced in the competition; however, The Japan News reports that one of the submitted books is titled “The Day a Computer Writes a Novel,” which ends with the sentences, “I writhed with joy, which I experienced for the first time, and kept writing with excitement. The day a computer wrote a novel. The computer, placing priority on the pursuit of its own joy, stopped working for humans.”
Ok, so maybe it’s no Hemingway or Fitzgerald, and some of the context may be lost in translation.
Nevertheless, the human coauthor of the novel, Hitoshi Matsubara, a professor at Future University Hakodate, and his team plan to continue advancing the “creativity” of AI.
“So far, AI programs have often been used to solve problems that have answers, such as Go and Shogi,” Matsubara said. “In the future, I’d like to expand AI’s potential [so it resembles] human creativity.”
Do you think AI could ever replace human novelists? How about other jobs? Share your thoughts by commenting below, tweeting me @kaylieannduffy, or emailing Kaylie.Duffy@advantagemedia.com.
