Writing robot makes its literary debut

Why we write on this subject:

AI is on the rise and offers endless opportunities. Which is why the various applications of AI are topics of interest to us.

Although artificial intelligence (AI) already has a multitude of applications, so far, writing a book is not one of them. Yet entertainment platform Fiction Horizon has attempted with some success to have a real book written by AI. Fiction Horizon has just announced this in a post. 

AI as a writer

AI has been used in recent years in fields such as healthcare and finance, among others, but it has barely ever been made use of in the literary field. Therefore, Fiction Horizon was eager to explore whether it could also use AI to write a book. “We have always been fascinated by the skill and potential of AI. That’s why we wanted to launch an ambitious project: to create a sci fi book written entirely by AI. We managed to do that with ‘Holding Out Hope,'” says Hrvoje Milakovic, owner of Fiction Horizon. 

Fiction Horizon used several AI systems for the project. For the writing, they made use of ChatGPT from OpenAI. To illustrate the book, they used a combination of Midjourney and DALL⋅E2. “Our goal was to see what ideas and capabilities current AI systems have when it comes to storytelling and illustration,” Milakovic explains. 

AI artwork often turns out surprisingly well – Innovation Origins

Artificial intelligence is opening doors to new forms of art which there are conflicting opinions on. Art made with a paintbrush and paint or with a click of a mouse, in essence, it remains the same.

They began the process by giving ChatGPT a series of directions and simple ideas to provide the information it would need to write a story with. “We were amazed by the results. The AI needed only a few basic sentences for instructions and was able to create a complete and coherent narrative by itself,” Milakovic says. Nevertheless, a few sentences did need to be changed to make the narrative more consistent and to polish it up a bit.

Whereas the writing went very well with ChatGPT, the illustrations turned out a lot more difficult to create. While the AI managed to generate attractive graphics quite well, it proved difficult to achieve a consistent style. “We tried to create the face of one of the characters with AI. But we just got slightly different facial features on every second attempt, which made the character less recognizable to the reader,” Milakovic adds. 

If by now you have become really interested in the result, then there is good news. The book ‘Holding out Hope‘ is available free of charge. Milakovic is pleased with the result. “There is still so much more to discover and improve, but we are happy with the result. AI, with the right kind of help, appears to be quite capable of creating characters, a vivid setting and a good storyline.”

The image above this article was generated by DALL⋅E2.