Let This AI Show You How to Start Your Romance
This must be the future because I am taking writing advice from the computer. I’ve always been a fan of Janelle Shane’s experiments with artificial intelligence because they are deliciously silly, as if a computer is just starting to learn ways of human language or concepts such as recipes or colors . But her latest creation is the opening sentences of the novels , and it’s ingenious:
I or was.
After the midday meal, the sun began to set, and the silence stretched out.
Once upon a time there was a man who lived a very long time; maybe three thousand years, or perhaps a thousand million years, maybe a trillion or so, depending on how scientists look at it.
“I am Eily and I am here to kill the world.”
I played with my dog, the brown labrador Mark, and I forgot that I was also playing with a dead man.
The black stone ached from the rain.
Luna stood on her own two feet.
The sentence that started the project (generated from a different training sample than the one above) is equally convincing: “I have to write to my neighbors about the monster.” This opens up so many questions: who is “I”? What kind of power is this person feeling? What is this beast? What role do neighbors play in all this? Why write if they live next door? I want to know everything. And yet the proposal itself is direct, declarative. You are right there, moving forward and ready to see how these questions are answered. Undoubtedly, a writer who can create such a scenario will masterfully investigate and resolve it. And yet the rest of the novel is gone. The writer doesn’t even technically exist.
In other sentences, there is a similar tension between prosaicity and obscurity. Each of them asks more questions than it answers, but seems to convince us that everything will make sense in due time.
Even sentences that don’t make sense, they don’t make sense in a subtle sense. Some of them remind me of the writing exercise that Natalie Goldberg recommends in her book Writing the Bones. Here are some of the things I mean:
The moon was low in the sky, as if it had been transported from the farthest reaches of the solar system.
The first star I saw was blue, which turned scarlet, then gold, green and finally yellow, which for several years after that appeared to be a black or even bubbling mass.
The sun rose slowly like a mighty black cat, and then plunged into a state of deep sleep.
The sea of stars was filled with the serenity of a million little birds.
The huge blue field was completely white, carried away by a blue-and-gold breeze blowing from the south.
The sky was cold and dark, and the cold wind, if not for the clouds, tied the children to the roof of the house.
“Verbs are very important,” writes Goldberg. “They are the action and energy of the judgment. Know how you use them. ” Then she asks us to list ten nouns, any ten. Then select an activity and write fifteen verbs associated with that activity. (For the chef, she suggests sauté, sliced, minced meat, etc.) Now your task is to combine each noun with one of the unexpected verbs, creating sentences such as “Violins boil the air with their music.”
The AI doesn’t know what the words mean, so it sometimes uses the wrong one. However, sometimes he completely chooses the wrong metaphor or action. But if you’re not writing hard facts, the wrong word may be poetically correct. Check out these computer-generated sentences and see if you can write ones yourself that will generate the same feeling of confusion and surprise.