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For the first time for a literary prize, a largely computer-written story has made it into the running, although it failed to make the final round.
Awarded by Japan’s top business broadsheet -- the Nikkei -- the Nikkei's Shinichi Hoshi literary award has for the last two years been open to non-human entrants.
The first entries compiled by computers failed to pass the initial screening, which is done blind i.e. the judges are not told if the entries are exclusively by human hands. This year, say the organisers, a short story titled "The Day A Computer Writes A Novel" managed to impress the judges enough to be considered for the prize.
“While this isn't the first novel written by a computer, and human programmers still had to supply a plot and other details, it's significant in that it impressed some judges in a blind screening,” Tim Hornyak, author of Loving the Machine: The Art and Science of Japanese Robots (Kodansha), told The Bookseller.
A team led by Hitoshi Matsubara, a professor at Future University Hakodate, created the AI programme that put the successful story together although he admitted in a press conference that the algorithm needed plenty of help to get started.
“Right now there is a great deal of human input needed to get the programme started,” admitted the professor. “It’s around 80% human effort, the computer does the rest."
The AI programme is first fed with words and phrases from existing novels, character profiles, plot lines which the programme then puts together to tell a story. This suggests the works are more pastiche than truly original, so far. Hornyak, however, believes one day such AI programs could come to match and even surpass human competitors.
“It will take some time but we will see celebrity silicon-based artists, musicians and writers producing works that can stand up to and even exceed human creations.”
A prolific science fiction writer, Hoshi - after whom the prize is named - was a master of the four-page, 8,000-word story, known as "short-shorts" in Japan, of which he wrote over 1,000.