Page 89 - AC/E Digital Culture Annual Report

Computer creativity as a means of instilling machines with creative skills
The world of literary creation has gone through a number of revolutions as a result of interacting with technology. Each time, the application of technology has managed to extend the reach
of existing works while facilitating the creation of new works. When writing was invented, it radically changed the concept of literature,
from works that were related in a strictly oral manner to works narrated through the written word. Telling a story no longer involved years
of learning something by heart, you just had to learn to read. This altered the way a piece of literature was enjoyed from something social
to something individual. The invention of the printer multiplied the number of copies you could have of a book which meant there could be a greater range of books. The same could be said of the explosion of digital technology, which has facilitated different means of distribution, self-publishing and E books.
We are now at a moment in history when Artifi- cial Intelligence is famous for breaking molds in industries where it has previously been glaringly absent. It is being used to find planets in distant solar systems and to optimize routes for taxi drivers in search of customers and to improve industrial procedures with analyzed data. So it’s reasonable to ask if the world of literature could be similarly affected in the future.
There are reasons beyond analogies with other sectors to suspect that Artificial Intelligence – or AI – will have a significant impact on literature in the not too distant future. Over the last twenty years, AI has been used to develop technological models related to literary creation, regarding both poetry and narrative.
This article explores the potential application of these new techniques to the generation of stories and poetry and takes a look at the most recent examples of literary creation that have
been influenced by them. It also analyzes a series of examples showing how digital technology in general and AI in particular are being applied
to areas related to the creation of literature. Using this analysis, a series of hypothesis will be laid out concerning the potential impact on the future.
The concept of creativity as an abstraction of observable behavior that is hard to define
There has never been any consensus in the world of academia over what creativity is and how it can be defined. When it comes to trying to reproduce the behavior of people who are generally considered to be creative, it involves working directly with their combined personal insights.
The objective of creating a model of the human skill to produce literature has been a goal since AI first came on the scene. The ability to create poetry and stories was one of man’s first skills and one that computers tried to imitate when
it was seen that they could do more than just calculate numbers. Technology and AI research pioneers’ interest in generation focused on the development of programs designed to generate poetry and tell stories. These attempts were generally based on exploring the application of fundamental techniques already in existence and finding out how they could be applied to the tasks they wished to model. Because of this, the most common approach was to focus on specific aspects of the task in question, aspects that showed a large degree of similarity to a concrete technique already in existence.
An example of this approach to making stories would be the use of plotting techniques that took advantage of the similarities between generating a story and making a plan involving a series of actions taking the reader from a specific starting point to a final conclusion. Another example could be the use of “reason based on
AC/E DIGITAL CULTURE ANNUAL REPORT 2018
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Digital Trends in Culture