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Comment by cubano | Hacker News Reader

> Now imagine the winning author of the next Hugo Award turns out to be an AI, how unsettling would that be.

I think that would be pretty awesome and amazing, to be honest.

I think it'd be terrifying.

Imagine the best book you've ever read. Entrancing, enlightening, cathartic. You reach the end, and it's ... perfect. Oh hey, a sequel. Wow, the sequel is just as good as the first book. It expands upon it without diminishing the original -- you feel better, more complete for having read it. Wait, is that a third book in the series? Wow, it's even better than the first two! A fourth -- well, maybe you should go to work now, it's Monday, but the book is so good. Calling in sick once won't hurt anything.

Imagine a perfect series of books, published without end, each better than the last, a new one coming out weekly ... daily ... hourly ...

This is only a bad thing if you feel compelled or addicted to reading these books. There is nothing wrong with always having a better book ready until you obsess about it.

What you describe is a push situation: the books come out and you have to try to keep up to speed with their release. It could however, also be a pull: whenever you feel like reading an amazing book, you just ask the AI to generate one for you, optionally continuing the last story you read.

Not one, but the best book that you need to read in this particular moment. Full with all the advice that you were seeking, with the right amount of new things that you learn and familiar knowledge that you reinforce. The protagonist casually comments things very related to the open issues in your work, and helps you see the particular issue you're having with your boss from another perspective. With just the right amount of common content so you can comment with your peers at work (perhaps your office pal is reading the story of a side-character in your book - the watercooler conversation is great, he gives you new insights for the reading of this evening - and now you both agree on the discussion thread of last week). Hey, what's that? It seems that the new upgrade is now able to create scenes in Unity with the scenarios that are covered by your next novel. Great! Also there's this interactive package where your work items can be not only an input but also an output and turns your work into a game. By the way your girlfriend has entered your book, let's switch to some of the shared scenes... let's put on our VR glasses... good. Now I only need someone to feed and clean me.

Scary :)

You could also potentially specify constraints on a book and have it generated for you, e.g. generate me a book about a gay dutch vampire in the 1800s. Could open up a whole new concept of hyper speciaised books tailored for individuals particular desires and preferences.

The practical problem with this is that, as I understand it, the deep learning system needs a pretty large data set to work with to infer rules from. You can do this with go because there is a constraint on legal moves and a deterministic win condition, but given how vast the number of potential novels is (If we count the space of all ten thousand word collections of grammatically acceptable sentences) the existing number of novels may no be enough to infer a pattern. (Though possibly you could split the problem up by separately doing the natural language processing and abstractin out the plot)

Ignoring the training problem, apply it to movies: I'd like to see this movie, but starring these actors, directed by this director, with a soundtrack by this composer/band.

I've lived that scenario, and the book was called heroin, so imagining it isn't really hard for me.

In the end all life is is one choice after another, and making good ones over bad mostly leads to a happier life.

So, the internet.

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