--- Lawrence Chu <lawrence@sandwich.net> wrote:

This is more a concept piece, using a Markov Chain
generator/outputter.
I've taken all of Kaydee's fic from the beginning of
the year and had its
word structure analyzed by a computer, and had it
spit out about 1500 words
in what it believes is Kaydee's writing style.

In that, it failed.  There is at least a little
consistency to Kaydee's works (e.g., in her latest,
she at least remembered who was talking on the phone
and where Soun initially answered it, so that Ranma
could pick up on the conversation and address the two
by name several paragraphs later), and she uses quotes
while this does not.  This has the high-speed
randomness, and complete forgetting of what happened
earlier (with consequent disentigration of anything
remotely resembling plot, to say nothing of subplots),
that are the most recognizable features of most
storyteller AIs.

The plot/memory issue has been partially addressed by
some of the more advanced AIs, I think.  Those might
be the equivalent of Kaydee's, although without the
(humorous, but probably not intentionally) creative
misuse of words.  The quoting is a simple programming
fix - even MS Word and the like get that right.  Not
that I'm saying Kaydee is an AI, just that her stories
are comparable to the best AI-generated stories that
I've seen so far.

In fact, she may be applying the same mechanical style
of thought to creating them - an easy task for a
human, since in this case the style typically doesn't
take much advantage of a computer's advanced logic or
high speed calculations, but rather just follows a
simple set of rules.  If she is, then she should stop
trying to discover and apply a simple formula, for
there is none.  While it might in theory be possible
to reduce an author's heart to a complex formula that
another person or AI could follow, one needs to be a
good author and experience the process - feel the
characters, the flow of plot, and similar unlabelled
things that most of those on this list know in their
hearts - by writing good stories before one has much
chance of discovering the formula, at least in a
machine-understandable form.

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