Anyone can author a novel, so long as there are loose definitions of what it means to “write” and what consists of a “novel.” The National Novel Generator Month is a month-long event where participants create 50,000 word-plus novels with the help of algorithms. Darius Kazemi, a programmer and creator of the event, gave participants a lot of freedom since there are very few rules to get involved. The rules are that the novel must have a title and contain at least 50,000 words. These events and what they produce really push the limitations of literature and raise many questions. One novel that was particularly interesting to me was “50,000 Meows” by Hugo van Kemenade. His code replaces every word in the classic novel The Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling with “meow,” keeping the length and the punctuation of every sentence the same. This is not a book by most people’s standards since there is no plot and really just one word 50,000 times, but alas it meets all the requirements of the event, showing that the event really is pushing what it qualifies something as a novel. Since there is more than one writer involved in the authorship of the novel, it raises the question about the true authorship of these types of novels and how far electronic literature can go before it becomes problematic to society.
After reading Will’s blogpost about the worst possible thing that can come out of Artificial Intelligence is take-over or mass genocide of the human population, I started to think about other more likely consequences of this technological advancement. If technology advances more and more, machines will improve and novels will actual be able to create stories that make sense. Eventually there will be no need for people to make the stories because we’ll have machines that are much more time efficient. Something that is more likely and therefore more problematic that could come out of this is that though computers might be able to create stories on their own that make sense, new novels will not reflect the human experience or true human emotions because they are not being written by a computer. This is something that could easily be overlooked but how can a machine understand emotions of love or regret or revenge? Even Will pointed out that AI does not have emotions, which means no matter how much technology progresses, books generated by a computer will never be the same as books generated by people. If computer-created novels were eventually the only on the market, there would be questions of whether this technology was censoring society and eliminating some freedom of speech but again this is unlikely.
