Why Computers Will Never Write Good Novels - Issue 95: Escape

The hoax seems harmless enough. A few thousand AI researchers have claimed that computers can read and write literature. They've alleged that algorithms can unearth the secret formulas of fiction and film. That Bayesian software can map the plots of memoirs and comic books. That digital brains can pen primitive lyrics1 and short stories--wooden and weird, to be sure, yet evidence that computers are capable of more. But the hoax is not harmless. If it were possible to build a digital novelist or poetry analyst, then computers would be far more powerful than they are now. They would in fact be the most powerful beings in the history of Earth. Their power would be the power of literature, which although it seems now, in today's glittering silicon age, to be a rather unimpressive old thing, springs from the same neural root that enables human brains to create, to imagine, to dream up tomorrows.