Google has AI writing 'rather dramatic' fiction as it learns to speak naturally

Google is training AI to speak more naturally, and the early results are pretty entertaining. As spotted by Quartz, Google recently presented a paper describing how it's trying to train AI to naturally fill in the gaps between one sentence and another unrelated sentence. To do that, it's using a new neural network model that's been trained by analyzing 12,000 ebooks, primarily fiction -- with a lot of those being romance novels. The technique is working, insofar as it's getting better results than earlier methods did. But its results are still unnatural -- and often, they end up creating what the researchers describe as "rather dramatic" sequences that are certainly inspired by the fiction Google's been feeding it.