AI-Written Books: Can Artificial Intelligence Write a Novel?

AI-written books are now an incoming reality. But can they write the next great bestseller? And, is this art?

AI is already writing music, creating pictures for graphic novels, and winning art competitions, beating humans. Next? Novels.

AI-Written Books

One of the first experimental AI-written novels turned up as early as 2017. Called 1 the Road, it was an experiment by Ross Goodwin. It was written as he drove from New York to New Orleans. Strangely, Google funded part of the cost of the project.

Goodwin was accompanied by a laptop-based AI hooked up to various sensors, whose job it was to output text. At the end of the journey, Goodwin left the text unedited. He even found a publisher – Jean Boîte Éditions. While he felt that the text was “choppy” and had many typos, he wanted to preserve it for future study.

The opening sentence reads, “It was 9:17 in the morning, and the house was heavy.”

Singularity Hub’s Thomas Hornigold said that while it wasn’t a masterpiece, “you might see, in the odd line, the flickering ghost of something like consciousness, a deeper understanding”.

The Atlantic’s Brian Merchant said he read the book in one go, despite there being no particular plot or story arc. But he said there were “some striking and memorable lines.” Lines like: “All the time the sun is wheeling out of a dark bright ground.”

So as we move into the metaverse, and storytelling forms a part of this, how much of gameplay or metaverse entertainment will be written by AI? Potentially – all of it. But are we there yet? Will AI be writing all of our future books, movies, metaverse lore, and gaming storylines? And should this worry us?

AI-Written Blogs

Anyone who blogs for a living or anyone who produces content for marketing purposes has probably heard of AI assistants. These are websites that promise to write your blog content for you. The idea is that you enter some key phrases and shape the direction of the content a bit, and voilà! You have your blog done for you.

But don’t get excited, this isn’t quite the case yet. But we are definitely getting close.

As a writer, of course I would try this out. I chose Jasper.ai and paid the subscription, which was around $50 a month. Considering I was already paying for freelance writers to help me out on different parts of my business, this seemed like a bargain. No lunch breaks, no holidays, no complaining, no challenging my terrible ideas… it’s a dream come true!

Until it isn’t.

The first thing I will say is that these AI assistants can knock it out of the park. There are some things they can do really well. I once asked Jasper.ai to write me an article on razor clams, with recipe ideas. The AI smashed it.

However. I had to do a lot of shaping, and checking of “facts.” That is, sometimes the AI told massive lies! Also, it can’t do things like search for pictures and videos that lift the story and make it more interesting. So a human touch is definitely needed.

I worked out that using the AI meant that I output this particular story twice as fast with the AI. Which is great! But then…