Peering Into the Future of Novels, With Trained Machines Ready
AI writing books?
In a new fiction by Aidan Marchine low quality nachos on a plate are described the following way:
“Cheese was rigid, and the chips were dank, damp and faded with a slippery coat like a kind of waste. Gus wanted to take a bite, but the scent was moldy, a sickly sweet parody of cheese. He washed it down with a gulp of beer, but it tasted awful, like it had been on the sun for too long”
The writing is colorful, but it is regular. The author Aidan Marchine is unusual, though, because it’s a set of machines.
Stephen Marche wrote “Death of an author” using three AI systems or AI wrote it, using plotting and prompting by the author.
Pushkin Industries will have the novella published in the coming months as an audio-book and ebook. The moniker “Marchine” is also machine-invented.
Pushkin’s CEO approached Marche with the question of production of a murder mystery. Marche has been writing extensively about artificial intelligence since 2017. Marche wrote “Death of Author”, extensively using AI.
Marche used three programs the following ways: ChatGPT for an outline, for notes and prompts. The AI’s plots were horrible, however dialogue and a few other things were good.
Sudowrite was used for writing sentences, their tonality. Cohere was used for the best lines in the book. It was also trained with examples from Marche and later on generated different options of its own, from which Marche chose the best for the book.
Marche says that, if one makes hip-hip, it’s important to know how beats work, how hooks work and how to combine those meaningfully.
There’s a lot of scares of AI displacing authors, but as Weisberg says, it is also about creating opportunities. For instance, if AI was trained to report daily on fire, one could focus on more important social stories.
The other area where technology was clearly behind was marketing and narration. That’s why they hired a human for the book’s audio version.
AI Catalog's chief editor
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