Hal - Deliberately Basic

I read in The New York Times today (April 14, 2008) that a San Diego man has written more than 200,000 books, with the aid of computers. Most of these are highly selective esoteric works that only sell a few copies. Philip M. Parker has declared himself the most published author in history.

Mr. Parker has programmers who develop algorithms to amalgamate information, and then write it to a Word document. His automated method does the research, and compiles the work using 60 to 70 computers.  Assuming the words are in order, the information is dispensed accurately, we come to the the big question. Will computer generated writing replace human writing?

As a point of departure, consider what is written on blogs. The blogs that receive the most attention are almost always “how to” articles. And the current attention grabbers are 23 ways to do (insert a noun or phrase). Those who write these articles research the information, and bam, 15 ways/tips/predictions or methods to accomplish any given task. These tips, ways and methods are not usually generated out of the author’s head; they are researched and put together (amalgamated) from various sources. In fact, I don’t see a lot of creativity here, except to think of what to put together.

News stories are not much more than facts put together in a reader friendly way. Hell, we don’t read anyway; we skim for facts. For years we have used boilerplate text, and template plots for novels. Mr. Parker is in the process of producing romance novels generated by computer algorithms. From “how to” to sitcoms to rudimentary novels is not a great leap. How do you know what you are reading on any web site is generated by a human? In fact, you don’t.

Years ago I bought a little book called “The Thirty-six Dramatic Situations” by Georges Polti. The first paragraph on the back cover sums up the gist of the book.
“It has long been known to the writing profession that there are no new plots…that all the conceivable situations have been used, and that all modern plots are but variations and adaptations of certain original situations.” This was written in 1921 - my copy is a 1977 publication.

This does not mean that creativity in writing does not exist. Of course it does. You can paint a rose an infinite number of ways, even though a rose by any other name is still a rose. Therein lies creativity. But we need to separate “15 ways to paint a rose” written on a blog somewhere from your way of seeing a rose, which may be different than any way the rose has been portrayed before.

I see computer generated text as prevalent as grass in the future. You plug in statistics, facts and parameters and a program will research and write a perfectly good article. a perfectly good article… a perfectly good article…

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