
Can a robot write books? Yes, and they're absolutely terrible. - slaterhearst
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/10/books-by-a-robot-an-investigation-into-an-amazoncom-mystery/246996/#.TqA25rGnoUU.hackernews
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wong
I think you look into too much the word "book".

The books you're thinking is a type of content. But if you look at book as a
delivery technology (a stack of paper together) then its perfectly reasonable
to have generated books, just like you have generated pdf reports with
generated charts and graphs.

To make the kind of book you and I think of as content (novels, investigative
journalism, etc...) using a pure AI/machine approach is still a bit away.

Personally, I'm experimenting AI + human solution to create the kind of books
most people would want to read.

You are probably referring to this man.

"Philip M. Parker (born June 20, 1960) holds the INSEAD Chair Professorship of
Management Science at INSEAD (Fontainebleau, France). He has patented a method
to automatically produce a set of similar books from a template which is
filled with data from database and internet searches.[1] At Amazon.com, Parker
is listed as the author of 107,000 books that his program created and overall
he claims to have produced 200,000 different titles.[2][3] This would make him
one of the most prolific authors in the world. Parker publishes the automated
books through ICON Group International, using several ICON group subheadings.
Via EdgeMaven Media, he also provides applications for firms from different
business domains to create their own computer-authored content
material.[4][5]"

See: *
[http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/14/business/media/14link.html...](http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/14/business/media/14link.html?_r=3&adxnnl=1&pagewanted=print&adxnnlx=1319130153-hklXOkF7+spMHNqafbUt8w)
* <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_M._Parker>

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klenwell
The New York Times ran a more detailed story a few years ago about a computer
programmer somewhere in Southern California who had thousands of titles on
Amazon written by a Perl script. As that article explained, certain large
libraries buy just about any title published. It was effectively a scam to get
these institutions to pony up a couple hundred dollars each for bound copies
of Wikipedia copypasta.

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hugh3
I, too, was hoping this article would be about _The Policeman's Beard Is Half
Constructed_.

It has, however, filled me with a desire to write a script that writes novels
(which I could then sell on Amazon). Perhaps I'll do that for this year's
NaNoWriMo.

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theatraine
These are relatively simple programs, which should be easy to stop. More
concerning is the usage of computer programs that compose original material.
Using learning techniques, researchers have written programs capable of
creating original cs papers from a given corpus (ie SCIgen, and other
techniques). How long until we see junk books created by these more
intelligent (and much harder to detect) algorithms?

~~~
noonespecial
<http://xkcd.com/810/>

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cleverjake
A much more interesting story (that you can also buy on amazon) is The
Policeman's beard is half constructed. A book of short form literature and
poems written by AI in the 80s. <http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0446380512/>

~~~
sp332
RACTER was a hoax. It was basically a fill-in-the-blanks program using
templates that the author, William Chamberlain, fed it.
<https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/RACTER>

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For_Iconoclasm
I worked on a natural language processing project as my required directed
study in college. We focused on language generation and took an extremely
naïve approach to the problem since it turns out that literature on
alternative types of language generation (as opposed to simple generation from
_n_ -grams) is not well-proliferated.

Needless to say, it was very hard. Semantic representation by itself is very
difficult to tackle; AI in general far off from simulating the wit and
ingenuity of a human being's writing, though I don't believe it will be like
that forever.

For the curious: we didn't get very far into the project, but our next move
was going to be trying to combine WordNet, FrameNet, and VerbNet to create
stories that sounded like they described something plausible. We only got a
bit past "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously," though.

It's something that I say I want to hack on again someday, but I don't know if
I will. The two of us have other code projects right now.

~~~
uniclaude
Not that your comment is wrong in any manner but I must admit that I cannot
understand its relationship with the article.

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burgerbrain
1) old news.

2) give it time...

