A Novel Partially Written by A.I. Shortlisted for Japanese Literary Prize

[Karnos]

Quote Originally Posted by miguel1984

Quote Originally Posted by Nirvana In Karma Bit of an extreme, wort-case scenario connection, but relevant reading nonetheless. Regardless, a damn-fine story. And a damn fine video game too.

I've been playing it recently, in fact. The puzzles aren't as obscure as in other adventure games from the time, including Cyberdreams's own Dark Seen, and that's a relief.

Discovering these old gems is such a joy. They're fresh and original, a nice reminder of the way games used to be not that long ago, compared to the horrid wasteland that's the triple A game industry these days.

[miguel1984]

Quote Originally Posted by Karnos

I've been playing it recently, in fact. The puzzles aren't as obscure as in other adventure games from the time, including Cyberdreams's own Dark Seen, and that's a relief. Discovering these old gems is such a joy. They're fresh and original, a nice reminder of the way games used to be not that long ago, compared to the horrid wasteland that's the triple A game industry these days.

Just today I was making a mental list of those old 1980s-1990s point-and-click adventure games I played and won (with or without help) and I ended with a list of 30 or more games.

Those were the times.

[qcrisp]

Quote Originally Posted by matt cardin

From the linked article on the novel-writing AI: Quote “So far, AI programs have often been used to solve problems that have answers, such as Go and shogi," Matsubara said. "In the future, I’d like to expand AI’s potential [so it resembles] human creativity.” From the essay "The Myth of Objective Consciousness" by Theodore Roszak, which can be found in his 1969 classic The Making of a Counter Culture: Quote "Artificial intelligence" is the logical goal toward which objective consciousness moves. . . . If the experience of time can be . . . objectified [as it has been in modern societies living under the dictatorship of clock time instead of actual lived experience], then why not everything else? Why should we not invent machines that objectify thought, creativity, decision making, moral judgment . . . ? Let us have machines that play games, make poems, compose music, teach philosophy. To be sure, it was once thought that such things were to be done for the joy of the playing, the making, the composing, the teaching. But scientific culture makes no allowance for "joy," since that is an experience of intensive personal involvement. Joy is something that is known only to the person: it does not submit to objectification. . . . So we come to the ultimate irony: the machine which is a creature of the human being becomes -- most fully in the form of the computerized process -- its maker's ideal. The machine achieves the perfect state of objective consciousness and, hence, becomes the standard by which all things are to be gauged. It embodies the myth of objective consciousness as Jesus incarnated the Christian conception of divinity. Under its spell, a grand reductive process begins in which culture is redesigned to meet the needs of mechanization. If we discover that a computer cannot compose emotionally absorbing music, we insist that music does have an "objective" side, and we turn that into our definition of music. If we discover that computers cannot translate normal language, then we invent a special, more rudimentary language which they can translate. If we discover that computers cannot teach as teaching at its most ideal is done, then we redesign education so that the machine can qualify as a teacher. If we discover that computers cannot solve the basic problems of city planning-- all of which are questions of social philosophy and aesthetics -- then we redefine the meaning of "city," call it an "urban area," and assume that all the problems of this entity are quantitative. In this way man is replaced in all areas by the machine, not because the machine can do things "better," but rather because all things have been reduced to what the machine is capable of doing.

Yes, this is actually what is happening.

https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/434...to-will-itself

Still intending to write more on this, but feeling very ill today...

[qcrisp]

It seems ironic to me that it was in Japan that the A.I. was shortlisted, as this is a development very much counter to the aesthetic of yuugen.

What is essential to yuugen? One element, I would say, is what might be called 'negative space' - the blank from which the ink of a sumi-e emerges. Or the blank between the lines of writing.

Here is a famous poem by Myoe:

O bright, bright,
O bright, bright, bright,
O bright, bright.
Bright, O bright, bright,
Bright, O bright moon.

There are people who sneer at this poem, but the first time I read it, I recognised the sheer inspiration of it. Monkeys at typewriters and aleatory A.I.s might write this poem sooner than others, but if they are not communicating anything, we are not summoned to imagine.

In a gaol cell, on the wall, perhaps you will see lines scored into the stone - a tally of groups of four vertical lines crossed with diagonal lines. Let's say there are forty-seven lines in all. We infer that they tell a tale of forty-seven days. A machine could reproduce the same marks in a minute, but it would not have the same meaning.

I have translated the following from Matsumoto Hajime's book on Nagai Kafu, Nagai Kafu to iu Ikikata:

Quote

Even if we just look at Dyspepsia House Days we have a diary that was continuously maintained for forty-two years: what can it mean? He wrote it until the very eve of his death, for forty-two years, every day. Two or three times I have tried to read the whole thing right through, and have managed to trace the overall shape of it. After 1947/1948 you move quite naturally on to 1949/1950. When you get to 1955, knowing that this diary only extends to 1959, you begin to feel tense. The volume of writing for a day's entry, with each year that passes, becomes less; the date and weather are recorded in dutiful repetition; if there is a visitor that day, the name is written down: "So-and-so raiwa [came-and-talked]." What they talked about is almost entirely omitted; just the word "raiwa" is repeated again and again. What a convenient ideographic compound it is -- how dry these two syllables! But in this monotonous repetition, what a commingling of myriad feelings there might be.

This online literary magazine is dedicated to poetic pieces written by AI. The best are written by the AI curated on Tolstoy, but they're still terribly clumsy.
CuratedAI