literature and technology: the automated author

My favourite short story ever would have to be Roald Dahl’s The Great Automatic Grammatizator. I read it for the first time when I was about twelve, and loved the absurdity of these two business partners producing novels in a matter of minutes on a machine. I’ve re-read the story several times since, and it never seemed any less absurd, until I stumbled upon a website called ‘The Haiku Laureate’.

For those who don’t know it, in Dahl’s short story two business partners create a machine into which they can feed novel plots and names and settings, which the machine then arranges into a novel in minutes, according to a mathematical algorithm based on the rules of the English language. The business partners in the story completely overtake the literary world and become rich.

Despite the technological leaps since Dahl wrote the short story, it still seems improbable that a machine could ever write as creatively as a person. The Haiku Laureate is a website which comes scarily close to doing just that. The website generates haikus based on places in the world. The website claims that any place or address you can put into Google maps can be put into The Haiku Laureate and, within seconds, it will produce a three-line, 5-7-5 syllable poem about that place. The haikus are generated by using Flickr to find images of that location and building a list of words associated with the location. Those words are then used to generate a haiku. For example, here’s what generated when I typed in ‘Adelaide, South Australia’:

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It’s hardly literature, or a great haiku. The website admits that the haikus generated are ‘interesting but very obviously of robotic origin’.

Despite the robotic nature of the current creations, what is worrying about such a website is the fact that these haiku are being generated by original thought. People upload photos with titles and captions onto Flickr for The Haiku Laureate to trawl through. The internet is full of original thought, ideas which people send out into cyberspace. What is stopping a mathematical algorithm, such as this website uses, from scanning through the thousands of words on the internet and constructing more than just a three-line haiku out of the contents?

Despite the ability of an algorithm to produce coherent writing, there would still be an aspect of authorship behind such creations. Without human thought and input, they would not exist. In some ways, it is similar to hiring a ghost writer to write a story. The ghost writer is fed the plot from whomever they are writing for, and then translates that plot into an engaging narrative. Dahl’s short story claims that the English language is formulaic enough to be recreated by a machine in a similar vein, so long as a person tells the machine precisely what it wants. I imagine there would be hours of proof-reading involved once the story is produced, to remove expectations to the rules of English and make sure the machine didn’t spit out sayed instad of said, or goed instead of went.

Machines already make a writer’s life easier by allowing us to type, cut, edit, paste and save multiple copies of our work. A mistyped letter no longer means retyping the whole page. Perhaps the next step in the process is computer-generated stories from ideas people have fed into it and a sturdy red-editing pen for afterwards.

I don’t believe machines will ever have the capacity for original thought. It will always be up to people to feed ideas into a machine. But, judging by the way The Haiku Laureate works, there is definitely the possibility for more complicated works to be produced in the same way. Dahl’s satirical short has one man feeding plots into one machine. But what happens when thousands of people feed thousands of “plots” into thousands of interconnected machines all over the world?

The content on the internet is already there to create compelling stories. Now all we have to do is wait for a mathematical formula that can arrange English into flawless creative writing. What now takes a writer a week, month or year to write could be produced in mere minutes. It probably won’t be literature. But it will be fast and the content thick.