# First Novel Written by a Computer



## Kyle R (Dec 5, 2014)

Vitali Vitaliev, a contributor to _E&T Magazine_, reviews the first ever novel written by a computer. 

Should we celebrate or scream in panic?

Enjoy! :encouragement:
---------------------

"There's nothing else here but the bloody sea and the bloody rocks… And it is in such a drab place that I am going to kill you," the woman muttered.

Not a bad start for a thriller novel. How about an end? Here it is: 

After that, he sat on the wet sand, so close to the water that the waves - heavy and clumsy like pregnant seals - were almost touching his feet. The setting sun was painting pink the underbellies of the clouds hanging low above the grey sea. White caps could be seen here and there, but it was obvious that the storm he had been expecting all day was not going to happen.

A fairly fluent and lively description, I would say. If not to count the "pregnant seals".

Whose literary style do the extracts (which, incidentally, I have translated from Russian) remind you of? Ian Fleming? Stephen King? Harold Robbins?

No need to phone a friend. The name of the author is *PC Writer 1.0*, and the above quotes are taken from the 285-page book, with an intriguing title 'True Love.wrt' (for brevity, let's call it simply 'True Love' from now on) and the subtitle 'An impeccable novel', he (or rather "it") has penned down.

"The first ever book written by a computer," says the blurb (in Russian, no doubt). And that reminder is helpful, for opening 'True Love' at random and leafing through it, one can be forgiven for thinking that it is an average modern novel whose heroes (both goodies and baddies) happen to have the same names as the characters of Leo Tolstoy's 'Anna Karenina': Levin, Vronsky, Kitty and Anna, of course. The only Tolstoy protagonist that is missing is the fatal Steam Engine (or "Parovoz" in Russian) - definitely a baddy.

To write 'True Love', a group of software developers and philologists working for the publisher Astrel-SPb created the program PC Writer 2008 over a period of eight months.

The philologists then compiled 'dossiers' on each of the novel's main protagonists: these described their appearance, vocabulary, psychological profile and other key characteristics. The novel was then 'written' by the computer over three days.

The style of 'True Love' is truly "impeccable", if at times a bit clichéd: 

Kitty couldn't fall asleep for a long time. Her nerves were strained as two tight strings, and even a glass of hot wine, that Vronsky made her drink, did not help her. Lying in bed she kept going over and over that monstrous scene at the meadow.

The book's razor-sharp and very colloquial dialogue is totally devoid of any peculiar speech patterns, i.e. all the characters sound precisely like one and the same early 21st century young urban professional.

And the vocabulary, the turn of phrase and the sheer length of sentences (succinct), as you might have noticed from the above samples, are definitely not Tolstoy's. If so, you are absolutely right, for the authors of the computer program, at St Petersburg-based Astrel-SPb, have uploaded (alongside 'Anna Karenina') 17 modern works of Russian literature. A Russian translation of a novel by Japanese author Haruki Murakami was used as the main style matrix (to make PC Writer 1.0 more PC, so to speak?). The result is a grammatically correct and free-flowing Russian-ese mongrel of a modern novel, populated by Tolstoy's characters.

*How about the plot?*

The computer-devised denouement of 'True Love' is of course significantly different from that of 'Anna Karenina'.

In Tolstoy's novel, Anna meets and falls in love with Andrei Vronsky, a handsome young officer. She abandons her child and husband to be with him. When Vronsky tires of her and leaves her to go to war, she kills herself by leaping under a train. 

In 'True Love.wrt' by PC Writer 1.0, the characters find themselves on an uninhabited island. All of them have amnesia. They know who they are, but don't remember if they are married or have children, and what relationship they have with each other. They are given a chance to build their relationships anew.

Would the latter plot make Leo Tolstoy's ghost even more pale (with envy) than he is already? I don't think so. But outwriting Tolstoy was not the aim of the program's creators. As Alexander Prokopovich, chief editor of Astrel-SPb, explained modestly in an interview for _The St Petersburg Times_: "The program can never become an author, like PhotoShop can never be Raphael."

*Pregnant seals*

His opinion, however, was not shared by the ebullient post-Communist Russian media.

"The new author is indeed promising. He doesn't require royalties, won't go on leave and will always deliver on time," enthused NTV, Russia's main TV channel. Their 5th Channel colleagues took the concept even further, having russified it a bit: "A cyber author won't get pregnant or go on a drinking binge!"

I am happy to agree with the last statement: making PC Writer pregnant would require a coup of audacious science-fiction. Yet it cannot be stopped from creating other pregnant creatures, like the "heavy"-going and rather naff "pregnant seals". Metaphorically speaking,   a "cyber-writer" can still be made pregnant with clichés and give birth to a piece of unadulterated trash.

Whatever the scary (for real flesh-and-blood writers) predictions may be, I am not in a hurry to change my battered author's toga for the expensively casual jeans-and-trainers outfit of a computer wizard.

Contrary to some Russian newspapers' prognosis, 'True Love' has not become "a literary bomb". While being an undisputed achievement of the country's IT professionals and linguists, it still has a long way to go to being even distantly comparable in literary merit to the hasty black-ink scribbles of the bearded and short-ish Russian Count.

As the serious _Izvestiya_ newspaper concludes: "Leo Tolstoy would have had enough sense of humour to laugh off the whole PC Writer idea…"

So, in the foreseeable future there's little chance of a computer producing a new 'Anna Karenina', 'War and Peace' or even a 'Harry Potter' and JK Rowling's 'Fortunes'. The only possible blockbuster we can expect is most likely to be called 'PC Writer and the Pregnant Seals'.

As the modernised, computerised and Haruki Murakami-sed Levin mumbles prophetically on page 61 of 'True Love':

"You know what: I would have been very scared of what's to come had I not been so drunk."

---------------------

_Source: http://eandt.theiet.org/magazine/2009/01/after-all.cfm_


----------



## Deleted member 56686 (Dec 5, 2014)

How about we laugh our heads off? :highly_amused:


----------



## Gargh (Dec 5, 2014)

I'm just going to creep away and pretend I didn't read this... :hopelessness:


----------



## Bishop (Dec 5, 2014)

The author of this says it rather well when describing the dialogue as voiceless. Until there's an actual AI that has full consciousness and sentience, I find it hard to believe any machine can truly replicate emotional pangs of the human experience.

I think this was a bit of putting the cart before the horse. They made a computer that could write a book, but really if they just made a computer that was closer to being human, it would have the ability to write a book anyway. And they'd have an infinitely greater breakthrough. I do seriously hope that I'm alive long enough to see the first sentient artificial being...


----------



## Bloggsworth (Dec 5, 2014)

I'm sorry, I thought I was reading something by Jeffry Archer...


----------



## Jeko (Dec 5, 2014)

Sounds like 1984 to me. Though this isn't what I mean when I talk about 'mechanical' writing.


----------



## ppsage (Dec 5, 2014)

Thank God. Now we can all get on to something important.


----------



## dale (Dec 5, 2014)

i don't know. i could see our commercial dull-minded generic society going for crap like this.


----------



## garza (Dec 5, 2014)

Check-out stand romances and mysteries have been written this way for as long as there have been supermarkets with check-out stands. You can order the publishers package and you get detailed plot outlines and character and setting descriptions. It's the writing equivalent of paint by number. From the sound of it, the computer is doing a better job than the humans who write supermarket paperbacks.


----------



## Mistique (Dec 5, 2014)

Gargh said:


> I'm just going to creep away and pretend I didn't read this... :hopelessness:



Can I join you?


----------



## joshybo (Dec 5, 2014)

> I do seriously hope that I'm alive long enough to see the first sentient artificial being...



And if scientists would stop fooling with building AIs and focus on immortality serums, we would _definitely_ be alive long enough to see the AIs.


----------



## bookmasta (Dec 5, 2014)

Am I the only one who finds this disturbing?


----------



## Blade (Dec 5, 2014)

garza said:


> Check-out stand romances and mysteries have been written this way for as long as there have been supermarkets with check-out stands. You can order the publishers package and you get detailed plot outlines and character and setting descriptions. It's the writing equivalent of paint by number. From the sound of it, the computer is doing a better job than the humans who write supermarket paperbacks.



That I would find disturbing. I think you take the original review as a little promo for a novelty item.[-X


----------



## garza (Dec 5, 2014)

Blade - 'Tis possible you do not know about supermarket paperbacks. They may not exist in Canada, and, indeed, may have disappeared from supermarkets in the U.S. It's been 20 years since I last was there, and no doubt there have been changes. I'm not talking about books by known authors but books by writers whose identities are as fictitious as their stories. Cheaply printed, they sit, or at least sat,  in racks near the check-out stand.  

The supermarket romances and mysteries were, and if they yet exist probably continue to be, written to strict formula. I wrote one about 50 years ago. I was paid 600 dollars - straight sale. It was easy money. Think paint by numbers. That was the first novel I ever published. I sold my second one a few weeks ago. In between was a lifetime of non-fiction - profitable but nothing to hit the NYT BS list.

My new novels are, I assure you, not written to formula.


----------



## Deafmute (Dec 5, 2014)

Is it bad that it took those guys less time to program a computer to write a novel than it has for me to just write one normally? I'll be over here bashing my head into a wall if anyone needs me.


----------



## InstituteMan (Dec 5, 2014)

This is a great story premise. Not an entirely new premise, but still a great one.


----------



## J Anfinson (Dec 5, 2014)

What's scary is, that article is dated January 2009. How much has the program improved since?


----------



## InstituteMan (Dec 5, 2014)

J Anfinson said:


> What's scary is, that article is dated January 2009. How much has the program improved since?



On the Internet, no one knows that you are a quasi-sentient computer program.


----------



## Bishop (Dec 5, 2014)

InstituteMan said:


> On the Internet, no one knows that you are a quasi-sentient computer program.



Dude, don't tell everyone, they're gonna be onto me--I mean... you. Yeah, you're the computer. NOT ME.


----------



## Kyle R (Dec 6, 2014)

For those of you who don't know, I'm actually a world class computer programmer and robotics expert.

After decades of research, I'm created an automated story generator that is guaranteed to churn out best-selling novels by the second.

Right now, you all get to witness the first of such stories. Yes. You're welcome.

Behold! STORY GEN 1.0's first best-seller!!! 

*hits GENERATE*

Story begins computing...

_beep-boop-beep-bap-bwop!_

:emmersed:
*
PROPER NOUN*_ *VERB* (past tense) to the *NOUN*.

*PROPER NOUN* felt *EMOTION*. "I'm *EMOTION* (past tense)!" *PROPER NOUN* *VOCAL VERB* (past tense). "More *EMOTION* (past tense) than I've ever felt before!"  *PROPER NOUN* *VERB* (past tense) out of the *PLACE*.
_

"STORY COMPLETE"
...
..
.
*
Jeremy sneezed to the moon.

Jeremy felt relieved. "I'm relieved!" Jeremy exclaimed. "More relieved than I've ever felt before!" Jeremy convulsed out of the used car lot.

*... Aw, nuts. :grief:


----------



## Bishop (Dec 6, 2014)

Kyle R said:


> *
> Jeremy sneezed to the moon.
> 
> Jeremy felt relieved. "I'm relieved!" Jeremy exclaimed. "More relieved than I've ever felt before!" Jeremy convulsed out of the used car lot.
> *


----------



## joshybo (Dec 6, 2014)

> *Jeremy sneezed to the moon.
> 
> Jeremy felt relieved. "I'm relieved!" Jeremy exclaimed. "More relieved than I've ever felt before!" Jeremy convulsed out of the used car lot.*



Where can I pre-order the sequel?  I _must_ know what happens next.


----------



## J Anfinson (Dec 6, 2014)

Kyle R said:


> *
> Jeremy sneezed to the moon.
> 
> Jeremy felt relieved. "I'm relieved!" Jeremy exclaimed ejaculated. "More relieved than I've ever felt before!" Jeremy convulsed out of the used car lot.
> *



Now it's sure to be a bestseller.


----------



## Sc0pe (Dec 6, 2014)

Ehe. Put it next to spell check, the calculator or you slandered gaming. Impressive from the outset yes but once you understand that it's working under a set of rules that are built under zeros and ones. It may look like it is writing but at best it cant be nothing more than a Pc stringing words together with some well placed maths.


----------

