While many people in the world are worrying that robots will take over human jobs once artificial intelligence (AI) is fully developed, it's a safe bet that no one put "author" at the top of the robot job list. Yet, now that a Japanese AI program has co-authored a short-form novel that passed the first round of screening for a national literary prize, it seems that no occupation is safe. The robot-written novel didn't win the competition's final prize, but who's to say it won't improve in its next attempt? The novel is actually called The Day A Computer Writes A Novel, or "Konpyuta ga shosetsu wo kaku hi" in Japanese. The meta-narrative wasn't enough to win first prize at the third Nikkei Hoshi Shinichi Literary Award ceremony, but it did come close.

Many AIs are developed to sift through and make sense of Big Data. But behind-the-scenes, others are acquiring softer human skills and deploying their algorithms to make art. On Monday, Hitoshi Matsubara, a professor of computer science from the Future University in Hakodate in northern Japan, announced that his research team's short-form novel--co-created with an AI--had passed the initial screening of a domestic literary competition. Though their creation didn't nab the grand prix, the human-machine collaboration showed the early promises of what could be, if the team's AI is refined in the future. "So far, AI programs have often been used to solve problems that have answers, such as Go and shogi," said Matsubara, in a report by the Yomiuri Shimbun.

"The day a computer wrote a novel. The computer, placing priority on the pursuit of its own joy, stopped working for humans." A pretty profound line--considering this sentence is part of a book that was actually co-authored by an artificial intelligence (AI). While it may not have won the top prize, this short-form novel, which was a collaboration between humans and an AI program, managed to make it through the first round of screening for a national literary prize in Japan called the Nikkei Hoshi Shinichi Literary Award. Titled'The Day A Computer Writes A Novel,' the short story was a team effort between human authors, led by Hitoshi Matsubara from the Future University Hakodate, and, well, a computer. Matsubara, who selected words and sentences for the book, set the parameters for the AI to construct the novel before letting the program take over and essentially "write" the novel by itself.

While many people in the world are worrying that robots will take over human jobs once artificial intelligence (AI) is fully developed, it's a safe bet that no one put "author" at the top of the robot job list. Yet, now that a Japanese AI program has co-authored a short-form novel that passed the first round of screening for a national literary prize, it seems that no occupation is safe. The robot-written novel didn't win the competition's final prize, but who's to say it won't improve in its next attempt? The novel is actually called The Day A Computer Writes A Novel, or "Konpyuta ga shosetsu wo kaku hi" in Japanese. The meta-narrative wasn't enough to win first prize at the third Nikkei Hoshi Shinichi Literary Award ceremony, but it did come close.