I writhed with joy, which I experienced for the first time, and kept writing with excitement. The day a computer wrote a novel. The computer, placing priority on the pursuit of its own joy, stopped working for humans.
—“The Day a Computer Writes a Novel”1
The rather wistful paragraph above is the ending of “The Day a Computer Writes a Novel,” a short story that was indeed written by a computer. It was created by a Japanese team at Future University Hakodate in Japan and in 2016 was entered for the Nikkei Hoshi Shinichi Literary Award, a competition for science fiction stories. There were eleven computer creations up against stiff human competition. “The Day a Computer Writes a Novel” didn’t win, but it did get through into the second round.
To put together their novel, the engineers at Future University wrote a novel of their own, then broke it down into its constituent parts—words, phrases, characters, and plot outlines—and fed these into the AI for it to reassemble into another story similar to the sample. So it was not so extraordinary that the result read like a “well-structured novel,” as Satoshi Hase, an eminent Japanese science-fiction novelist, said at the award ceremony.But there were some problems, he added, “such as character descriptions.”
In effect, the novel was a rehash, with apparently 80 percent human contribution and only 20 percent from AI. So it seems the time is not yet here when computers will thrill us with their literary creations. But it may be on its way.