Post #117 March 26, 2018

“Automated Storytelling”

Today, bots are writing stories in place or of in collaboration with human authors.  For the most part, this is more prevalent in journalism and the newspaper business.  With software like Buzzbot and Heliograph, journalists now have newsroom associates that are actually just algorithms, helping them craft stories from disparate facts.

Why are newspapers doing this?  Speed.  Efficiency.  Cost.  Some news stories are better automated than others.  When a type of story can be crafted from highly structured data, with well-defined patterns, easily understood templates, algorithms can help.  Examples might be sports recaps, stock market reports, some types of new stories like accidents, fires, routine police cases.  In all these cases, the foundation of the story consists of a set of fairly well-defined facts and the writing normally adheres to a well-understood pattern, or template.

Download the facts, select the temple and press START.  Out comes a story.  It may need a little editing but then so do stories done by human writers.

Is such a thing possible in the world of fiction?  It is and it’s happening now.

From the website Mashable.com, comes this little gem:

Deep inside an MIT laboratory, an artificially intelligent bot is composing ghastly tales of nightmarish creatures and strange shrieks in the night. 

MIT researchers named their bot Shelley (after Frankenstein author Mary Shelley). They endowed her with an artificial mind, called a neural network, an advanced form of machine learning in which a computer learns a task by relying on training examples. In Shelley's case, MIT researchers fed her silicon brain 140,000 horror stories published by writers on Reddit's "No Sleep" forum.

 Endowed with this massive story bank of fright, Shelley is a program that churns out its own unique tales of the undead and soon-to-be dead.

"She's creating really interesting and weird stories that have never really existed in the horror genre," Pinar Yanardag, a researcher at the MIT Media Lab, told the Associated Press. Pinar gives the example of a man who awakes in a hospital bed to find he's pregnant. 

Another of Shelley's stories begins: I had no choice but to get out. I turned around and saw my mom. She had a menacing look on her face, holding a small box with my dad's stuffed animals in it.

But Shelley doesn't just concoct fictional dread by herself. Her MIT creators encourage Twitter users to interact with the hell-bot. Each hour, Shelley tweets the beginning lines to a story. Real humans can reply with the story's next lines, which Shelley will read and add to.

Shelley's MIT creators hope her autonomously-generated text will provide answers to an important question about AI: "Can machines learn to scare us?" 

As the machine receives more feedback from interactions from humans, it learns how to fashion authentic terror — or at least, that's how it's designed. This isn't too different from AI neural networks learning to render realistic faces or dominate popular board games. 

Shelley may not be truly terrifying just yet. But beware: In the deep witching hours when you're asleep, she's wide awake — and training to become even more horrifying. 

As a writer of science fiction and horror, I find this idea both compelling and a bit horrifying myself.  Could the bots be taking over the formerly sacred precincts of fiction writing?  Could these artificial storytellers possibly be convinced to help aspiring authors craft even better stories?

I can think of five ways storytelling bots might help fiction writers.

1. Speed of writing – get your drafts done and edited in record time.  Put in some details, select a template and voila!
2. Generating plot twists – with enough plot templates (and let’s face it, there’s a lot of formula in genre fiction), you could vary the complications in your story in such a way as to surprise even the most jaded reader.  Clive Cussler, look out.
3. Generating character bios – writing extensive character background is something I do a lot of as it helps in writing series fiction, where you have recurring characters and you have to be consistent to be believable.  If had some templates for character biographical background, I could plug in some basic facts (appearance, personality type, key events in their life) and let the bot do the rest.  Call it BioBot.  That would definitely make my life easier.
4. Help with story outlines – I do extensive outlines of my stories ahead of time.  I call them Chapter and Scene Details.  If a bot could help me flesh out my outlines, with help from the Plot Twist Bot (maybe these are the same), I could save days off my prep time and spend my afternoon hours on the back deck, watching the birds and planes with a beer in my hand.  Load all my character bios, select certain templates, set parameters on action and press START.  It’s nirvana.
5. Grabbing setting details off the Net – this is putting my bots to work as research associates, gathering facts, details, quirky bits of information that can add realism to a story, even if it’s set on the planet Tralfamadore (apologies to Kurt Vonnegut).

Could bots replace a writer’s unique, memorable, even edgy word sense?  Could bots simulate a Faulkner, a Mark Twain, a Stephen King?  I’m thinking the answer is no, at least not yet.  I think the best use for fiction bots is as a research assistant and copy editor.  Bots could definitely help in editing and already do, with spellcheck and online grammar-checking and auto-correct functions.  Maybe our bots could help in a deeper story sense, with balancing narrative against action scenes and recommendations on pacing. 

In my book, fiction bots have a definite role and are definitely coming, in some form.  They can best help us humanoid writers in planning, outlining, character bios, setting details, editing and adherence to genre styles and traditions, just like the Shelley bot above.

For now, though, the humans should stay firmly in control of the story.

Due to the Easter holiday, the next post to The Word Shed comes on April 9, 2018.

See you then.

Phil B.