Those of us working in prose generation have come to the conclusion thatΒ§
neural nets and otherβ¦
While generative fiction has been around for a long time (there were machines
writng screenplays for westerns in the 50s), a lot of currentβ¦
Those of us working in prose generation have come to the conclusion that
neural nets and other statistical methods (like markov chains) are not the
best ways to generate interesting fiction. Statistical methods require a lot
of training data for each unit of output, and need to be tweaked to be
optimized for different scales. Parameters that generate an interesting title
would not be capable of generating an interesting first sentence, and in order
to be successful, fiction needs to simultaneously optimize for three
potentially conflicting goals at many different scales: novelty, coherence,
and evocativeness.
While generative fiction has been around for a long time (there were machines
writng screenplays for westerns in the 50s), a lot of current activity among
hobbyists and non-academics occurs around the NaNoGenMo community, established
in 2013. From my experience there, it seems like the most effective methods
involve a combination of generative grammars (i.e., rules for producing
meaningful arrangements of words, built along the same lines as sentence
diagrams), planners (i.e., pieces of code that are provided with an
environment, a starting point, and a goal, and then produce a series of
actions), and a context & tradition that encourages reader projection
(experimental-looking styles encourage readers to see mistakes as hidden
intentions β comic books and prose styles that are reminiscent of Joyce or
Burroughs end up seeming much more interesting because of this, and can get
away with a lot more randomness). Nevertheless, rarely to the results remain
interesting for more than ten pages. My personal favorite project used
generative grammars and planners to produce a pretty convincing imitation of
mediocre Star Trek fanfiction β for about 30 pages.
By John Ohno on November 3,
2017.
[Canonical link](https://medium.com/@enkiv2/those-of-us-working-in-prose-
generation-have-come-to-the-conclusion-that-neural-nets-and-
other-b3f30fcc9729)
Exported from Medium on September 18, 2020.