Alphabet Inc (NASDAQ:GOOGL) has been feeding romance novels to its artificial intelligence engine to teach it how to respond in a human-like manner.
Engineers working on the technology have so far managed to get the AI to start dishing out sentences that are much like those found in romantic novels. It might appear unusual, but the company claims that the strategy has been working, and the AI can now write sentences based on the novel content learned. Software Engineer, Andrew Dai, claims that the AI is capable of writing its own novel. Dai also hopes that the technology will be more conventional and even take up diverse style, register or tone.
Why the novels are ideal for the task
The engineers use the romance novels to program because they have a predictable narrative path or style. Each book has unique characters but the style is often very similar, and Alphabet’s AI can identify the pattern to grasp a better understanding of the language. So far the engineers have subjected the AI to roughly 2,865 romance novels.
Alphabet’s AI can write its own novel, but it would not be the first artificial intelligence machine to do so. Developer, Darius Kazemi, was the first to achieve this feat when he initiated the National Novel Generation Month (NaNoGenMo) in 2013. Kazemi used an AI system to create ‘Teens Wander Around a House.’
Alphabet is not the only company with such a machine-based learning technology. International Business Machines Corp. (NYSE:IBM) has a similar AI known as Watson. IBM’s AI has been used for a wide range of applications due to its ability to analyze different types of data sets. A team of researchers from the Future University Hakodate in Japan developed an AI that wrote a novel that was ironically titled,’ The Day a Computer Wrote a Novel.’
Dai also stated that Humans could eventually grow fond of the AI because it is programmed with content about love. It, therefore, has a romantic and polite language.