FlazX - Artificial Intelligence and Literary Creativity: Inside the Mind of Brutus, a Storytelling Machine

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Machines that can summarize documents are commonplace, as well as machines that can extract words and lines from paragraphs and rearrange them to possibly form something useful or interesting. But can a machine write a short story, or even a full-fledged novel with complex characters and themes? That such ability is not only possible for machines but is actually present in some of them is the subject of this book, and if one ignores the philosophical rhetoric on the "strong AI" problem, the authors give a fine overview of their project to create a "story-telling machine", which they have designated as BRUTUS.

The authors claim that their book "marks the marriage of logic and creativity", a claim that will raise the eyebrows of many a philosopher, literary critic, or novelist. But the intuitive dissonance that many in these professions may have regarding the reduction of the free-play of the imagination to the rigors and organization of logic should not dissuade others from believing that such a reduction is not only possible, but has actually been accomplished. Ironically, the authors early in the book assert that there are no examples of machine creativity in the world. Of course, this assertion depends on one's notion of what creativity is, and to what degree this creativity may have depended on the assistance of machines. Machines that create new mathematics, scientific theories, music, or novels do not yet exist, the authors claim, but they do take pains to express their optimism regarding future developments in "machine creativity".

The authors are incorrect in their belief that there are no machines now that can currently develop new and interesting results in a wide variety of different domains. In addition, their notion of intelligence is too anthropomorphic, too tied to what human intelligence is, or is not (and one could argue that machine intelligence is even better understood than human intelligence). The authors though have written a book that gives the reader much insight into what is involved in building creative, thinking machines. Most refreshingly, the authors do not want to settle the question of machine creativity from the comfort of their armchairs, but instead from the laboratory by actually building artificial authors. Philosophical speculation is for the most part eschewed, and is replaced by the rigors and sometimes frustrations of laboratory experiments.

According to the authors, BRUTUS exhibits "weak" creativity rather than "strong", with the latter being compared to the creation ex nihilo, examples of this being non-Euclidean geometry and the Cantor diagonalization method from mathematics. Weak creativity on the other hand, is a more practical notion, and according to the authors is rooted in the "operational" one developed by psychologists. In the development of BRUTUS, the authors wanted to create an automated story generator that satisfied seven requirements: 1. The machine must be competitive with the requirements of strong creativity. 2. The machine must be able to generate imagery in the mind of the reader. 3. The machine must produce stories in a "landscape of consciousness." 4. The machine must be capable of formalizing the concepts at the core of "belletristic" fiction, with the example of "betrayal" being emphasized the most by the authors. 5. The machine must be able to generate stories that a human would find interesting. 6. The machine must be in command of story structures that will give it "immediate standing" in the human audience. 7. The prose developed by the machine must be rich and compelling, not "mechanical". BRUTUS they say meets all of these requirements, but no doubt some critics will think otherwise. The authors do make a sound case for their assertions that it does, and it is the belief of this reviewer that they have, and that BRUTUS is one of first automated story generators. With optimism toward the future developments of BRUTUS and artificial intelligence in general, they state that "a machine able to write a full, formidable novel, or compose a feature-length film, or create and manage the unfolding story in an online game, would be, we suspect, pure gold. "

They are right.

Artificial Intelligence and Literary Creativity: Inside the Mind of Brutus, a Storytelling Machine

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Artificial Intelligence and Literary Creativity: Inside the Mind of Brutus, a Storytelling Machine

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