Can a dozen artists, technologists, and scholars collaborate with each other and with machines to produce a readable, interesting story in under 12 hours?
With the STUDIO for Creative Inquiry acting as his temporary home base, bestselling author and technologist Robin Sloan led a pop-up writing collective of students, artists, and scholars through a three-day experiment of generative fiction.
Sloan, whose first book 'Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore' has been called a love letter to digital humanities, visited CMU for an extended artist's residency at the invitation of the Frank-Ratchye STUDIO for Creative Inquiry, the Department of English, and dSHARP.
His most recent work experiments with human/computer collaborative writing, with the development of a machine that reads a selection of written text and suggests possible words to come next in the sentence or phrase. The machine does this by reaching into its model of language, a recurrent neural network trained on whatever collection of text seems appropriate, and trying to find sensible endings to the sentence a writer has started.
During Sloan's visit, an assembled team of artists and scholars gathered for four hours a day for three days, connected with Sloan's generative text editor, and attempted to assemble a readable short story in the space of 12 hours.
Inspired by David Markson's 'The Last Novel,' Sloan decided to compile the short story in 1-3 sentence snippets, which would allow people to contribute as much or as little as they were able. The story would be about a yet-unnamed artistic movement, so he pre-trained his recurrent neural network on the biographies of artists, and the group got to work.
The ensuing narrative took the form of a short account of the Center for Midnight, a fictional artistic movement of the late twentieth century. The results exceeded expectations, resulting in intriguing sentences and phrases such as:
'The golden age of lithography'
'She embroidered the ideas of Laura de Gioste on a seaside tree.'
'When he died, she is reported to have said, ‘He became a response to himself.''
On the final day, Sloan put order to the group's words and replaced a few proper nouns to solidify the narrative thread. The contributors marked any confusing passages and spent time fixing problem sections: making the narrative flow, removing tangents, and tightening the text.
Somehow, amidst the chaos of machine prose and a rotating group of amateurs, the group had assembled a story with a narrative arc, enjoyable prose, and a coherent (if strange) plot.