Artifical Intelligence generated High Phantasy

 A friend, David Wilson, said to me recently "I was imagining an AI that could be trained to 'continue the Great Work' once one has departed this earth."

This got me thinking because I'd thought it had already been done. David Cope has written a program which creates music in the style of Bach for years. Now he's even selling the tracks on Amazon:

You can sample the audio here. 

Some of you will say: "This is clearly computer created because..." 

I'd answer: "Bollocks. If you did not know it was created by a program you'd never guess. You are like people who know good wine by the label and not by the taste. Fuck off you idiots." But that's just me, after a few whiskeys.

Anyway. There are also computer generated images, I'm still selling a few copies of Gliftex every month. It does not use AI and has a fairly simple model of how to create a visual pattern. (There are three components Form, Colour Scheme, and Interpretation). But others have gone much further in AI generated images. Here is one set of examples.

So why not written work like novel? I think my friend was referring to that when he said: "I was imagining an AI that could be trained to 'continue the Great Work' once one has departed this earth."

I believe the big difference is that in music and visual art a huge amount is brought to the piece by the listener/viewer. Neither music not visual art needs to "make sense". It needs to give pleasure, emotion, interest.

But a novel needs to make sense as you read it. And AI currently cannot go that deep.

By coincidence, the day after my friend spoke, I finished reading (for the second time)  "The Murdstone Trilogy" by Mal Peet.

It is a novel about an author with no money who is pushed by his agent into writing a High Phantasy trilogy...

 

There is a part about AI generated scripts and novels:

 

(The novel was so good I went to look for others by Mal Peet, but he died in 2015, quite young. "The Murdstone Trilogy" was his first and last novel for adults.)

Aaron Brancotti sent me a link to the GPT3 Open AI Natural Language Processor. It is impressive, but has no idea of a plot or personalities, essential for a good novel.