"One can easily imagine how an AI tool could greatly help the writers of a television serial that has been on the air for many years keep everything consistent and at the same time suggest new possibilities." - Michael Lebowitz

Computers as Authors? Literary Luddites Unite! Essay by Daniel Akst. The New York Times (November 22, 2004). "This is not science fiction. With little fanfare and (so far) no appearances at Barnes & Noble, computers have started writing without us scribes. They are perfectly capable of nonfiction prose, and while the reputation of Henry James is not yet threatened, computers can even generate brief outbursts of fiction that are probably superior to what many humans could turn out - even those not in master of fine arts programs. Consider the beginning of a short story dealing with the theme of betrayal:.... That pregnant opening paragraph was written by a computer program known as Brutus.1 that was developed by Selmer Bringsjord, a computer scientist at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and David A. Ferrucci, a researcher at I.B.M. ... Computers have been doing literary work for a while now - helping nab plagiarists, for instance - and there is even fiction-writing software for people to use, in one case complete 'with 2,363 narrative situations.' ... If we don't get much good fiction out of computers, we may at least gain some wholesome new perspective on the process of creating literature. The advent of storytelling computers suggests that thinking people and thinking machines confront many of the same problems in writing fiction, even if their solutions are different. ... The economist Herbert Simon, who reminded us of the futility of trying to consider every possible alternative in a world without end.... It was Simon's ideas - particularly his notion of 'satisficing' - that first got me interested in fiction-writing machines. ... Computers are just as subject as humans to Simon's 'bounded rationality.' Computers cannot create narratives by using brute computational force to mindlessly try every alternative."

• To meet Brutus, see: Artificial Intelligence and Literary Creativity: Inside the Mind of Brutus, a Storytelling Machine. By Selmer Bringsjord David Ferrucci (1999). The Preface is available online via a link from Selmer Bringsjord's web site.

Interactive Storytelling - Is this the future of computer games? Does the future of computer games and simulation depend on interactive storytelling? Chris Crawford thinks so -- and he's bet his Oregon farm on it. By Michael Swaine. Dr. Dobb's (September 6, 2006). "Since abandoning games he's been pursuing the holy grail of interactive storytelling. He's held conferences and developed a following and created an engine for interactive storytelling, but has had no success in bringing the technology to market. That could be about to change, and if Chris has gambled right, his interactive storytelling technology could shake up computer games and computer-based training. ... DDJ: Let's talk about the system. Maybe we could start by defining some of the key terminology. Like storyworld?CC: A storyworld is a data structure that contains implicit within it zillions of possible stories. When a player interacts with the storyworld, he generates one story. DDJ: And storybuilder?CC: A storyworld is created by someone we call a storybuilder, who is an artist who uses our development environment, which is called 'SWAT,' to build storyworlds. DDJ: SWAT is an acronym for... CC: 'Storyworld Authoring Tool.' There are three programs. A storybuilder uses SWAT to create a storyworld. The second technology is the [Storytron] Engine, the third technology is Storyteller, which is the consumer program. Both Storyteller and SWAT access the Engine, Storyteller to play it, and SWAT to run Rehearsal, our testing feature. ... DDJ: Let's talk about applications. Does Storytron lend itself to storytelling for other than entertainment purposes, like training?CC: Oh yes. It'll be very useful for corporate training, military training, educational stuff. Basically, it's a social interaction simulator. In fact [it might be] better to think of it as a simulator, because the stories it generates are very different from conventional stories."

All Work and No Play Makes HAL a Dull Program. By Michael Lebowitz. From Ray Kurzweil's book, The Age of Intelligent Machines (1990). "The clear majority of applied work in artificial intelligence (AI) has involved practical problems in such areas as business, medicine, defense, and so forth. This is as it should be, but there is also room for the application of AI to the arts. AI has the potential to allow the creation of compelling new entertainment forms and to improve the creative process in existing art forms. In addition, such work can lead to important new insight into the creative process. In this article I shall discuss how AI can be applied to the area of story telling: both how it can be used in intelligent tools for writers and how it might lead to new forms of intelligent, interactive stories where a writer/creator can intimately involve a reader/user in the story."

Computer Program Writes Its Own Fiction. By Jennifer Viegas. Discovery Channel News (January 26, 2007). "Could a computer one day be a fiction bestseller? While a computer-written bestseller may be unlikely, a technology expert has created a computer program that writes its own fiction stories with minimal user input. The program, called MEXICA, is the first to generate original stories based on computerized representations of emotions and tensions between characters. Rafael Pérez y Pérez [a computer scientist at the Autonomous Metropolitan University in México City], MEXICA’s creator, explains, 'The program keeps a record of the emotional links between characters while developing a story, and employs its knowledge about emotions to retrieve from memory possible logical actions to continue the story.' ... 'Programs like MEXICA are computer models that help us to conceive, and therefore to understand, how we write stories,' Pérez y Pérez said."

• Visit Rafael Pérez y Pérez's homepage for more information.

Artificial Intelligence-based Art and Entertainment research conducted by Michael Mateas,Assistant Professor,College of Computing,Georgia Institute of Technology. "A major thrust of my research is Interactive Drama. Façade, a collaboration with Andrew Stern, provides a good demonstration of interactive drama, showing how novel approaches to character AI, story AI (drama management) and natural language processing can be brought together to create a dramatically compressed, intense, first-person experience."

• "Façade, the world's first fully realized interactive drama, is now available for free download!"
• Also see these related articles:
  • Redefining the Power of the Gamer (June 7, 2005)
  • Emotional Rescue - Are interactive soap operas the future of gaming? (May 9, 2006)
  • Sex, Lies, and Videogames - What if a computer program combined the action and graphics of a video game with the emotional power of great art? The result could revolutionize interactive entertainment -- and even change the meaning of “play.” By Jonathan Rauch. The Atlantic Monthly (November 2006, 298(4): 76-86; subscription req'd). "In certain rarefied circles of AI academia and video-game design, people sometimes theorize about a computer program that would combine the graphical realism of a modern video game with the emotional impact of great art. 'Interactive drama,' the concept is called. It might contain artificial people you could converse with, get to know, and love or hate. It might engineer dramatic situations, complete with revelations and reversals. Entering this world, you would feel as if you had been thrust into the midst of a soap opera or a reality-TV show. 'I had some idea how to do it,' [Andrew] Stern says. [Michael] Mateas, for his part, had dreamed since childhood of building artificial humans. It occurred to him that he could advance his dream by building artificial actors. ... In the end, they accomplished, they reckon, about 30 percent of what they had hoped to do. 'We shot for the stars in hopes of getting to the moon,' says Stern, 'and we made it into orbit.' In July 2005, standing together over Stern's computer in Portland, they pressed the button that 'shipped' over the Internet, a new game called Façade."
    • Also see the related Web only feature from Atlantic Unbound (October 3, 2006): Beyond Space Invaders - Jonathan Rauch, author of "Sex, Lies, and Video Games," talks [with Jennie Rothenberg] about a new generation of innovative and emotionally complex video games. "[Q:] The 'drama manager' Mateas and Stern created sounds very complex. It can read subtle cues from typed-in words and figure out how to use them to move the story along. Can you tell me a bit more about the technology behind this? How, for instance, does a character know you’re angry? Do certain words tip her off? [A:] Façade has several layers of new technology going on. It has language recognition. It doesn’t have true language understanding yet, but if you type in a sentence, the computer will try to get a sense of whether it’s a hostile statement or a friendly statement and which character it’s directed at. ... [Q:] Have Mateas and Stern programmed in every possible situation they can imagine? Does the drama manager just say, 'Okay, he’s getting angry, and I know where to go from here'? [A:] ... This gets to the third level of artificial intelligence they’ve got going on. They’ve preprogrammed some basic dramatic possibilities. But these possibilities are like beads.... [Q:] It would be nice to think that a game like this could actually enrich real-life relationships rather than supplant them with artificial intelligence. Do you think it’s possible to learn more about human nature from playing a game like Façade or The Party? [A:] That’s exactly what the creators say they’re going for. ...."

Interactive Health Interventions: one of Stacy Marsella's research projects at the Intelligent Systems Division of the USC/Information Sciences Institute (ISI). "Interactive Pedagogical Dramas are compelling interactive stories that have didactic purpose. Autonomous agents realize the characters in the drama, which unfolds based on user interaction." Be sure to watch the "video captures of Carmen's Bright Ideas, an interactive drama designed to help mothers of pediatric cancer patients."

• Also be sure to check out her other research projects and her collection of Interactive Drama publications.

Virtual-Reality Movies Put a New Face on "User-Friendly" - Intense psychological drama requires computer agents to be "more human." Press release from The University of Buffalo, The State University of New York (February 24, 2005). "A virtual-reality drama by University at Buffalo researchers -- aimed at transforming the movie-going experience -- is driving the development of increasingly 'self-aware' computational agents that are able to improvise responses to the spontaneous actions of human users. ... The researchers' virtual-reality drama, The Trial The Trail, is a brand new type of dramatic entertainment, where instead of identifying with the protagonist, the audience becomes the protagonist. ... 'We started thinking, 'What happens if you put a powerful artificial intelligence system -- which is what Stu [Stuart C. Shapiro] has developed -- together with drama and stories?'' recalls [Josephine] Anstey. 'The potential seems endless. You can get to the point where you have virtual characters that can believably respond to humans in real-time.'" Be sure to see their QuickTime movies!

MakeBelieve, a project from the MIT Media Lab's Software Agents Group, "is a story generation agent that uses Open Mind knowledge to interactively compose short fictional texts with a user. While a user must start a story, MakeBelieve will attempt to continue that story by freely imagining possible sequences of events that might happen to the character the user has chosen." Games of infinite possibilities. By Jonathan B. Cox. The News & Observer (January 15, 2003). "R. Michael Young, an assistant professor of computer science at N.C. State University, is working on research that might one day make video games more enjoyable. Young, 41, is studying ways to build artificial intelligence -- the ability of computers to act like humans -- into games so that users get movielike stories. With such technology, for example, a game could adjust to a player's actions and provide a different experience every time it is played. He sat down with Connect's Jonathan B. Cox to discuss his work. ... 'Specifically, the stuff I look at tries to take ideas from conventional AI [artificial intelligence], linguistics, cognitive psychology and ideas about narrative theory and look at computational models of narrative, so that you can take these computational tools that are well founded on the other theories from other disciplines and automatically create stories inside a virtual environment.'"

Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Entertainment II: Papers from the 2002 Spring Symposium, ed. Ken Forbus and Magy Seif El-Nasr. Technical Report SS-02-01. American Association for Artificial Intelligence, Menlo Park, California.

Proceedings of the Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment Conference. "AIIDE is intended to be the definitive point of interaction between entertainment software developers interested in AI and academic and industrial AI researchers. Sponsored by the American Association for Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), the conference is targeted at both the research and commercial communities, promoting AI research and practice in the context of interactive digital entertainment systems with an emphasis on commercial computer and video games." Papers include:

• Dialogue Generation in Character-based Interactive Storytelling. By Marc Cavazza and Fred Charles. 2005. In Proceedings of the First Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment Conference, 21 - . Menlo Park, Calif.: AAAI Press. "In recent years, there has been significant progress in developing Interactive Storytelling systems, in particular in terms of the underlying AI techniques. There has been an emerging consensus on the AI approach, in particular the use of planning systems. However, these have concentrated on the generation of a sequence of narrative actions, staged through the behaviour of virtual actors. In order to achieve the long-term objective of implementing interactive media that would reproduce the aesthetic qualities of traditional films, most interactive storytelling systems are still missing the ability to generate dialogues between characters. We describe an extension of our Interactive Storytelling approach which integrates dialogue generation within narrative situations. Our unit of generation is the dialogue act (pair of utterances) and one main objective is to reproduce realistic dialogue phenomena based on implicit forms of expression. The emphasis is also on adopting a unified approach relating narrative representations to the linguistic form of the generated utterances. From a representation of active narrative goals and the emotional affinity between characters, our system is able to derive a set of parameters governing various aspects of the linguistic form to be generated. We illustrate this approach on several implemented examples."
• Interactive Story Writing Using ScriptEase. By Jonathan Schaeffer, Mike Carbonarro, Maria Cutumisu, Matthew McNaughton, Curtis Onuczko, Thomas Roy, and Duane Szafron. 2005. In Proceedings of the First Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment Conference, 163 - . Menlo Park, Calif.: AAAI Press. ScriptEase is a tool for writing interactive stories in roleplaying games that frees the author from doing explicit computer programming. A story is created by selecting and customizing patterns for the plot, encounters, behaviors and conversations. It has been implemented as a front end to BioWare’s Neverwinter Nights game. We will describe our experiences using ScriptEase as part of a high school English curriculum."

Narrative Intelligence, the 1999 AAAI Fall Symposium. "While narrative has long been a theme in AI, it has recently experienced a surge of popularity. Researchers in various subfields, including story generation and understanding, agent architecture, and interface agents, have taken independent forays into narrative, finding it a fruitful way to rethink some basic issues in AI. Strands of work in narrative intelligence (NI) include the following:Models of human narrative cognition ... Architectures for generating narratively understandable behavior ... Meta-studies of narrative as part of AI research....Within AI, this symposium includes work in areas such as story understanding, story generation, interactive drama, narrative structure in interface design, narrative structure in the design of autonomous agents, believable agents (insofar as they participate in narrative structure), and interactive story-telling. In addition, because NI researchers have drawn deep inspiration from concepts of narrative from other disciplines, several papers from other research traditions, including narrative theory, art, and cultural studies were also included."

• It's too late to attend, but you can still read the abstracts from Narrative Intelligence: Papers from the 1999 Fall Symposium, ed. Michael Mateas and Phoebe Sengers. Technical Report FS-99-01. American Association for Artificial Intelligence, Menlo Park, California.

Fast forward to the future of games. By Mark Ward. BBC. (August 30, 2002). "David Braben, co-creator of the legendary Elite game and now head of Frontier Developments, said better-looking games had to be matched by improvements in the way in-game characters were handled. 'Once you have characters speaking to each you realise how shallow the things are driving these things,' he said. Mr Braben said that game designers had to develop new skills that made in-game characters more intelligent and capable of meaningful interaction and even conversations. 'Once you move away from shooting games, when you are face to face with characters and you are not necessarily blowing their brains out the speech part becomes much more important,' he said."

Columbia Newsblaster - an automatic system for event tracking and summarization. Developed by members of the Columbia NLP Group.

• When Machines Become Writers and Editors - Will Newsblaster produce tomorrow's leads? By John V. Pavlik. Online Journalism Review (February 5, 2002).

Interactive Fiction. Edited by Haym Hirsh. IEEE Intelligent Systems. November/December 1998. "[T]hree delightful essays in this month's Trends and Controversies give a sense of how far we have gone and some of the challenges that remain."

• Character-based interactive story systems, by Barbara Hayes-Roth.
• Interactive fiction: the story is just beginning, by Andrew Stern
• Building coherent plots in interactive fiction, by Janet H. Murray.

"A (Kind of) Turing Test". By Ray Kurzweil. From his book, The Age of Intelligent Machines (1990). "The essence of the Turing Test is that the computer attempts to act like a human within the context of an interview over terminal lines. A narrower concept of a Turing test is for a computer to successfully imitate a human within a particular domain of human intelligence. We might call these domain-specific Turing tests. One such domain-specific Turing test, based on a computer's ability to write poetry, is presented here."

• Cybernetic Poet. From Ray Kurzweil. "The free Cybernetic Poet includes . . . The Poet's Assistant provides a simple word processor ("poem processor") in which you write your poem or song lyrics. Besides providing standard text editing features, the Poet's Assistant monitors your "poem-in-progress," and provides a wide range of helpful suggestions as you type. These suggestions are based on the poetry of other poets. RKCP comes complete with extensive files of poetry from 36 poets, including both classical and contemporary poets (you'll also enjoy just reading these included poems). Each suggestion is based on a "poet personality" that you select. Each poet personality is based on either one of the analyzed poets, or a combination of poets. The standard version of RKCP includes 50 poet personalities." And be sure to check out the page: How It Works.
• Also see: The Science of Art. By Raymond Kurzweil. Chapter 9 of his book, The Age of Intelligent Machines (1990). "The computer can be a powerful partner in exploring our thoughts and emotions and finding new ways of expressing them."

Narrative Prose Generation. By Charles Callaway and James Lester. In Proceedings of the Seventeenth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Seattle, WA, August 2001.

Oz Project Home Page. "The Oz Project at CMU is developing technology and art to help artists create high quality interactive drama, based in part on AI technologies. This especially means building believable agents in dramatically interesting micro-worlds."

The Virtual Theater. "The Virtual Theater project aims to provide a multimedia environment in which users can play all of the creative roles associated with producing and performing plays and stories in an improvisational theater company. These roles include: producer, playwright, casting director, set designer, music director, real-time director, and actor. Intelligent agents fill roles not assumed by the user. ... The Virtual Theater project is part of the Adaptive Intelligent Systems (AIS) project at Stanford University." - from the Playbill.

Hacking in the valley of the dolls. By Peter Laufer. MotherJones (May/June 1993). "Just This Once is a new novel about sex, drugs, and power, with an odd author's credit. Instead of 'By Scott French' it reads: 'As told to Scott French.' French is a Northern California writer, computer buff, and fan of Jacqueline Susann, whose Valley of the Dolls is the best- selling American novel of all time. Using his Macintosh IIcx computer and an artificial-intelligence program, French claims to have created a novel such as Susann would have written were she still alive. Just This Once is 'the first novel,' he says, 'ever written by a computer.'"

Related AI Topics Pages

• Art
• Chatbots (@ Natural Language Procesing)
• Creativity
• Information Retrieval (Text Summarization)
• Music
• Natural Language Generation
• Natural Language Processing
• Video Games

More Readings

AIIDE: Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment Conference. "AIIDE is intended to be the definitive point of interaction between entertainment software developers interested in AI and academic and industrial AI researchers. Sponsored by the American Association for Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), the conference is targeted at both the research and commercial communities, promoting AI research and practice in the context of interactive digital entertainment systems with an emphasis on commercial computer and video games."

• Proceedings of the Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment Conference (2005 - ).

The AAAI Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Entertainment Symposia: "Interactive, computer-based forms of entertainment, such as computer games, interactive fiction, and software toys, represent a large, technologically-savvy industry that is actively seeking powerful artificial intelligence techniques. Until recently there was little communication between the interactive entertainment industry and the AI research community. As a result, the interactive entertainment industry may be overlooking useful AI techniques developed by the research community and the research community may be overlooking interesting problems and constraints faced by the interactive entertainment industry."

• Papers from 2002 AAAI Spring Symposium. The table of contents and abstracts are available online.
• Also see the web site for this event.
• Papers from the 2001 AAAI Spring Symposium. The table of contents and abstracts are available online.
• Papers from 2000 AAAI Spring Symposium. The table of contents and abstracts are available online.
• Papers from 1999 Spring Symposium [Artificial Intelligence and Computer Games]. The table of contents and abstracts are available online.

Bookish Math - Statistical tests are unraveling knotty literary mysteries. By Erica Klarreich. Science News (December 20, 2003; Vol. 164, No. 25). "Stylometry ['the science of measuring literary style'] is now entering a golden era. In the past 15 years, researchers have developed an arsenal of mathematical tools, from statistical tests to artificial intelligence techniques, for use in determining authorship. ... For decades, computers have supported the work of experts in stylometry. Now, computers are becoming experts in their own right, as some researchers apply artificial intelligence techniques to the question of authorship."

Continuous Paper Print interfaces and early computer writing. By Nick Montfort, University of Pennsylvania,Department of Computer and Information Science. Presented at ISEA 2004.

• Also see: Continuous Paper. By Nick Montfort. Text of talk given at the History of Material Texts Workshop, February 23, 2004.