Robin "Sourdough" Sloan is using a machine-learning autocomplete system to write his next novel

Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2018/10/19/t9-for-auteurs.html

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Most of the text messages I send are written that way.

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i , for one , wellcome wellcome wellcome wellcome
< bonk>
our new automatron wordsmith spindoctor overlords !!
( my last humanoid spindoctor friend retires end of this year )

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That sounds fun podcast. What could cause lower back pain?

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I’ll certainly wait for the A.I. review.

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I just finished reading Gaiman’s Fragile Things. In the introduction he mentions using a very old autocompletion-thing to write “Diseasemaker’s Croup”, a brief little experiment cobbled together from descriptions of diseases. It does not seem to be available online, at least not legally.

Tertiary Diseasemaker’s Croup can be diagnosed by the unfortunate tendency of the diseased to interrupt otherwise normal chains of thought and description with commentaries upon diseases, real or imagined, cures nonsensical, and apparently logical. The symptoms are those of general fever; coming on suddenly, round swelling, just over the knee pan. When quite chronic, and finally, perhaps vomiting, offensive fogs. Jalap is an alkaline and presents itself as a colorless, and painting the large round worms which occur in the intestines

But the excerpt about the bison reminds me of a blurb from Sarah Palin’s Going Rogue, from the before-times.

As the soles of my shoes hit the soft ground, I pushed past the tall cottonwood trees in a euphoric cadence, and meandered through willow branches that the moose munched on.

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It looks like you’ve run out of ideas. Would you like to reuse one described in 1972?

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Bison bison bison bison bison bison bison bison.


Also: I miss OtherMichael :cry:

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The best example of writing using machine learning that I’ve seen was when someone made a bot of a particular commenter on a particular website I visit. The commenter writes extremely long posts that attempt to abandon the violence inherent in the dualistic nature of Western thought and language (subject vs. object, verb vs. noun, symbolic vs. real, etc.). The bot was a pretty good approximation, as far as I could tell.

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Won’t be worse than a Dan Brown novel.

Unrelated except by repetition is the groundbreaking work “Chicken: Chicken Chicken”:

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