A growing concern these days is how much, that we currently do to earn our livings, can potentially be done by computers. Many traditional professions have already been impacted by the encroachment of computer technology. In fact, professions such as accounting, medicine, law, and education have already been impacted to the extent that they are no longer recognizable from 50 years ago. Much of the drudge work has been automated so that the number of jobs is a fraction of what it used to be. Over the next 50 years it will become even more unrecognizable and require fewer and fewer people. Warehouses and restaurants are using more automation thus requiring less people. Intelligent vehicles will put a big dent in the number of jobs where people drive for a living. And so on.
So, for people, who write for a living, the question arises - generally, can computers replace writers, and more specifically can AI write stories? The answer, as is the case in most threatened professions, is yes and no. Before you get threatened or elated, let me explain. I'll cut to the chase, so you can see where I am going. If the story is based on a template, the answer is yes. If the story is based on reporting and sharing a person's internal subjective experiences, the answer is no.
I'll take the No side first and then go back and forth a bit. Computers do not have internal subjective experiences. That is to say that computers don't have emotions or feelings. Although I cannot say that computers will never feel, there is nothing on the horizon that suggests, in even the smallest way, that they will ever be able to experience feelings. They may be able to act as though they are responding to feelings. But they won't actually experience them. I have to say that it is a mystery to me how people feel. But they seem to. So, we just accept it. Since machines are not capable of feelings, and stories report on feelings, then anything not capable of feeling must not be capable of reporting on them. Hence, they cannot write stories.
So, let's take the other side. If a story is based on a template, then it may be possible to have an intelligent computer fill in the template and create a story. This would probably start out very crude. But if we had software that creates stories, and then have those stories evaluated by people, we could use machine learning to determine what makes the stories good and, thus, improve them. Theoretically, over time, the computer would get better and better at writing stories.
I would point out that when information systems were first introduced into corporate environments, the firewall between human and computers was judgement. People are capable of making judgements, the reasoning went, computers are not. Of course, today, computers make judgements every day at a rate which is many orders of magnitude greater than the rate at which humans make judgement. In fact, every time you react positively to an ad, email or popup while browsing the web, a computer somewhere has successfully predicted your judgement.
So, this is not as farfetched as it seems. There were studies where music was generated by computers and then evaluated by people. People were suspicious of this suggesting that no computer could write music as good as Beethoven (which tends to be more emotional than, say Bach which is more technical). But empirical studies suggest that this is not true. So, if computers can create music as good as the music masters, why couldn't they write stories as good as the literary masters? If you are still doubtful, try asking yourself if this could happen in 10 years, 100 years, 1000 years and so on. I think you will find that the answer is not if computers can do this, but when. And when often turns out to come sooner than more people would believe.
If there is an answer to that question (can AI write stories) I think it would be in the fact that the way people feel about the world changes over time and any author writing a story would be writing to the audience of readers at that time. Computer algorithms would have to be constantly updated. Since the algorithms would get better with refinement, the changing target of current emotions might present a challenge. Granted many stories written for an early 19th century audience still appeal to readers in the 21st century. But many of them don't. Even for those that do, they appeal to a more limited audience. Ask anyone if they would rather read Jane Austen's Emma or see the movie Clueless. I think the votes for Clueless would dwarf the votes for Emma. Similarly, ask someone if they would rather read Dickens Bleak House or watch the BBC series and I think the results would be the same.
This leads to a hopefully not so unexpected conclusion. Perhaps computers will be able to produce popular stories such as the script for a Situation Comedy or a Blockbuster movie, while deeper more reflective works will be left to humans. This is right in line with the professions that I began this piece with. We will need vastly fewer writers and those we have will be very skilled and very talented, which is to say that computers will take jobs away from average people. Hopefully, new average jobs will be created to replace them.
