The "brain holes" jointly created by 11 writers and AI to write science fiction man-machines is here
If AI is to create science fiction novels, will their imagination be comparable to science fiction writers?
On October 27th, the first Chinese science fiction AI human-machine co-creation writing experiment project was officially launched and will continue until December.
This project has an intriguing name-"Symbiosis".
We have entered the era of symbiosis between humans and artificial intelligence (AI).
In this era, AI is not only very capable, but also more and more versatile.
They can write poems, create music, and draw pictures.
If AI is to create science fiction novels, will their imagination be comparable to science fiction writers?
On October 27th, the first Chinese science fiction AI human-machine co-creation writing experiment project was officially launched and will continue until December.
This project has an intriguing name-"Symbiosis".
A wonderful adventure created by man and machine
Can artificial intelligence be engaged in creation?
"We said he could. His work is creation, not the imitation of humans. He needs to take us to a new world, which has various forms and life forms. He wants to know whether humans have adapted He created the new environment. He wants to know whether mankind has found a new home."
This paragraph of sci-fi and philosophical answers does not come from sci-fi writers or philosophers, but is automatically generated by the AI text generation model of Innovation Workshop.
The AI writing program used in the "Symbiosis" experimental project originated from the college student innovation project "AI Science Fiction World" in the DeeCamp 2020 artificial intelligence training camp of the innovation workshop.
During the training camp, this college student team independently designed and developed the main logic of the AI writing program, and developed an interesting intelligent writing tool, the core AI model of which came from the scientific research results of the innovation workshop.
In the "Symbiosis" project, the AI writing program used about 300GB of online public data sets for pre-training and then fine-tuned.
Participating in this experiment with AI are 11 emerging domestic writers.
Among them are Chen Chufan, chairman of the World Chinese Science Fiction Association, Xiao Bai, winner of the Lu Xun Literature Award, Jia Liyuan, associate professor of the Chinese Department of Tsinghua University, Ying Chen, winner of the Galaxy Award, Nebula Award winner Gu Shi, and Zhang Fan, the founder of Diaoyu City Science Fiction.
In the last two months of 2020, these writers will collaborate with AI algorithms to create multiple science fiction literary stories around themes such as environmental protection, human-computer relations, gender, and cultural diversity, and start a human-computer co-creation and writing. Wonderful adventure.
AI writing science fiction also has a "stroke of magic"
How do humans and machines create science fiction together?
At the event site, Chen Maofan, a science fiction writer, personally demonstrated it.
In the AI writing program, "customize" the time, place and role of a science fiction story, and the AI will automatically generate several science fiction plots.
For example, the setting of the story background is the "Back to the Future" meeting room in 2020, and the characters include Yong Gang and AI wizard.
The text prompts a sentence: Yonggang asked the AI wizard, how should I go back to the future?
"AI sprites, I don’t know, but our spaceship should have been destroyed 4000 years ago, and our spaceship will be destroyed 4000 years after we go to the future. If we are also destroyed one day , Then our civilization will really be destroyed..." AI "written" such a plot based on the above settings.
After several demonstrations, you will find that the story under the AI "writing" may have a bit of thinking, and the logic is not so rigorous, but there is no lack of "magic strokes" that make people inspiring.
For the plot automatically generated by AI, it does not need to be fully accepted. It is up to the science fiction writer to decide whether to use it or how to use it.
Chen Maofan selected some interesting sentences generated by AI, deleted other parts, and continued to generate. The AI writing program continued to generate more storylines.
"My experience tells me that artificial intelligence is particularly divergent. One thing it is more willing to do is to turn the storyline in a very complicated and very far direction, and people have to pull it back from time to time. Human and machine co-creation, many times It is a process of competing and competing against each other, which is very interesting.” Wang Yonggang, Executive Dean of the AI Engineering Institute of Innovation Workshop, said about his experience.
AI breaks the path dependence of writing
"The most important thing for writers is subject consciousness. If a writer does not monopolize his own words, but releases this thing, he is willing to cooperate with the machine to create, it is especially important." Zhang Fan said.
So, how do sci-fi writers feel about really letting AI participate in their own creations?
In fact, Chen Chufan had this writing experience before this experimental project.
"Back in 2017, when I signed a book called "The Algorithm of Life". I wanted to use 6 stories to show the future where humans and machines coexist. It will revolve around a series of scenes such as birth, old age, sickness and death. I thought of it at the time. , If the subject of this book is humans and AI, why not bring AI in.” Chen Chufan said.
Later, Chen Maofan contacted Wang Yonggang, and the two hit it off.
Wang Yonggang provided a similar AI program. Chen Chaofan inputs a large amount of sci-fi work data he has created (equivalent to training the AI program), and then enters keywords and subjects in the program when writing, and the AI will automatically generate several paragraphs of text .
"Algorithm of Life" uses some language generated by human-computer collaboration.
This book just won the Best Original Book Award at the 31st China Science Fiction Galaxy Awards this year.
When asked about the role of AI in human-machine co-creation, Chen Yufan replied that in the process of co-creation with machines, it can break the inertia of previous writing.
For example, writing too much work will form a kind of path dependence. When one sentence is written, the next sentence may go in a specific direction.
However, after trying man-machine co-creation, the text and ideas of the article have a certain degree of randomness, and there is the possibility of breaking the inertia, but instead opened many paths.
"For science fiction, the most important thing is this possibility. The machine will give me some freedom, rather than restricting my freedom. The machine is more of a partner, a tool, not a competitor." Chen Chufan said.
Human-machine co-creation, not limited to words
"Symbiosis" is just the beginning.
Where will AI join the future of human literary creation?
"I don't think AI can replace human writers, but it can create its own literary genre, that is, the AI genre." Science fiction writers judged early in the morning.
Early morning imagined that they might form different styles based on different algorithms, some of which are technological, some perceptual, some sociology, or natural science.
Even in the future, many different flavors can be added according to the programmer's interest.
In Chen Maofan’s view, human-machine co-creation experiments use more data and smarter algorithms, but the goal is not to write better works, but to break boundaries, open dialogue, realize dynamic interaction between humans and machines, and let thinking Collision and flow.
"AI human-machine co-creation is not just text-based creation. Next will be more tangible art forms such as images and music, bringing a full-sensory, immersive, multi-dimensional creative experience. We want to adopt a Experiment, a game, a conceptual adventure, with imagination as belief, dialogue as a method, breaking all boundaries and original knowledge classification, and pursuing the meaning of life, the universe and beauty." Chen Chufan said.
Wang Yonggang analyzed the significance of this experimental project from another perspective: the AI human-computer co-creation writing experiment not only revealed the scientific research value and humanistic value of cutting-edge AI technology, but also the super-large-scale Chinese generation based on pre-training technology used in the AI writing program. The model also has extremely important product and commercial value.
Wang Yonggang believes that in addition to writing science fiction, ultra-large-scale pre-training models will also be useful in the fields of online literature and online games.
For example, instead of hiring a lot of humans to write scripts for online games, AI can automatically design story clues and character dialogues in the game.
In addition, in the fields of search engines, medical care, education, law, and autonomous driving, super-large-scale pre-training models have broad commercialization space.
Our reporter Liu Yuanyuan