Hi all. This is my first post here at Kairosnews. I've been keeping a personal blog for about 4-5 years now, and I'm excited to expand my blogverse, as it were, to include this community.
I just came across a piece in the New York Times about computers writing fiction (registration required):
'Dave Striver loved the university - its ivy-covered clocktowers, its ancient and sturdy brick, and its sun-splashed verdant greens and eager youth. The university, contrary to popular opinion, is far from free of the stark unforgiving trials of the business world: academia has its own tests, and some are as merciless as any in the marketplace. A prime example is the dissertation defense: to earn the Ph.D., to become a doctor, one must pass an oral examination on one's dissertation. This was a test Professor Edward Hart enjoyed giving.'
That pregnant opening paragraph was written by a computer program known as Brutus.1 that was developed by Selmer Bringsjord, a computer scientist at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and David A. Ferrucci, a researcher at I.B.M.
[Another program is called StoryBook,] "an end-to-end narrative prose generation system that utilizes narrative planning, sentence planning, a discourse history, lexical choice, revision, a full-scale lexicon and the well-known Fuf/Surge surface realizer." Believe it or not, that description was written not by a computer but by the humans who created StoryBook, Charles B. Callaway and James C. Lester, who are computer scientists.
I sense many different, interesting takes on this. There is the question of how to deal with eventual scenarios when students have such programs to generate essays as well as questions of how such things might impact current understanding of composition & literary theory. The author isn't just dead, s/he's been replaced...
computers as writers are scary
Thanks for the interesting article, Sara. I wonder, too, how it may impact writing instruction. The author of the piece is equally concerned about how it will affect authors,
"Still, what has been accomplished so far is scary enough, and surely there is more to come, thanks to rapid advances in computing power and the rise of "narratology" (how stories are told) as an academic field of study, among other unwholesome trends that are making the novelist's life ever more perilous."
Scary, indeed. If the computer can write good prose, then wouldn't a writer be able to give it a passage and ask it to revise it for clarity or make adjustments in tone? Sort of the future equivalent of a grammer checker, only now we could have software which could adjust style and voice. Would it extend to having the computer rework a piece to provide alternative rhetorical approaches?
Sara
Are you the same Sara that used to attend USF?
Terminator 4?
Here are a few more scenarios:
Yes, same one
Yes, I'm the same Sara. Still here, almost done... :-)
Makes you wonder
Really makes you think about the value of (human) author. I suppose we couldn't do any psychoanalytic analysis of a computer-generated article, could we? Or does the programmer become the author? Hmmm...
Quick: Listen to a discussion
Quick: Listen to a discussion on BBC Radio 4's Today program: http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/today/listenagain/ram/today5_authors_2004112...
As one of the commentators points out, the machine-written, formulaic prose reads like a bad translation or hack work when set against human-composed prose.
Fun & Games with Emacs
Some emacs have a program called doctor--an automated psychiatrist like the famous Eliza program. You put in a response to a question and doctor creates another question based on your response. Another emacs game is yow, which displays a quotation from Zippy the Pinhead, "a freakish counterculture comic character whose life is punctuated by a repeated series of non sequiturs" (Harley Hahn, Unix Unbound). Hahn suggests feeding the input from yow into doctor and provides the following sample result:
The doctor's comments are a little uncomfortably close to my own non-directive comments on student papers.