Many people will be familiar with Aesop’s fables such as The Hare and the Tortoise, but now there’s a computer programme that uses artificial intelligence to write its own moralistic tales.
The Moral Storytelling System can create fables around particular combinations of emotions or desires felt by the characters in a story. There are 22 emotions to choose from in all.
It is the next step closer to enabling machines to make meaningful literary works in their own right.
Explaining how the technology works, Margaret Sarlej, a PhD candidate at the University of New South Wales in Australia, said: ‘a human author simply decides an interesting emotional path for the story, and the computer does the rest.’
‘The computer decides the events to elicit those emotional responses from the characters and the characters do whatever the plot needs them to do.’
A psychological model known as OCC, named after its creators Ortony, Clore and Collins, determines the emotions and Ms Sarlej’s computer programme is based on the OCC model.
The result is a kind of high-tech version of the famed Ancient Greek storyteller Aesop, although at the moment, the machine is not quite as eloquent.
The researchers hope that their computer programme will advance computers’ abilities to author stories with ever-growing sophistication and complexity.
Ms Sarlej’s supervisor, Dr Malcolm Ryan, predicts that computers ‘will be making interesting and meaningful contributions to literature within the next decade’.
‘They might be more experimental than mainstream, but the computer will definitely be doing some of the work of writing.’
The researchers hope that authors, computer game designers and other creators will see value in the research.
‘For us, this is a serious literary project and we want to find artists who can help direct it to that end,’ Dr Ryan said.
He believes that one of the benefits of collaboration is the potential to uncover new and exciting possibilities.
‘How will this technology be used? It is impossible to predict. We hope artists will take it up and create things we’d never imagined.’
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