✳flâneur — a map of the web's best reading

What Happens When an Algorithm Helps Write Science Fiction | WIRED

wired.com · 6,501 words · saved by 1 readers

THAT STATEMENT PROBABLY requires some explanation. Two researchers named Adam Hammond and Julian Brooke have spent the past few years developing software that analyzes literary databases. Their program can identify dozens of structural and stylistic details in huge chunks of text, and if you give them a collection of great stories—stories that maybe you wished you had written—they are able to identify all the details that those great stories have in common. That’s where I come in: I write stories for a living. (My last one was about werewolf billionaires. It was fiction.) And I’ve watched technology infiltrate countless trades and crafts, oftentimes improving how people do their jobs, all while passing storytellers by. Where’s the technology that can make me better at my job? Where’s the computational system that will optimize my prose? Hammond and Brooke agreed to collaborate with me on a simple experiment: Can an algorithm help me write a better story? I began by giving them a collec

What Happens When an Algorithm Helps Write Science Fiction | WIRED SCROLL DOWN SCROLL DOWN That statement probably requires some explanation. Two researchers named Adam Hammond and Julian Brooke have spent the past few years developing software that analyzes literary databases. Their program can identify dozens of structural and stylistic details in huge chunks of text, and if you give them a collection of great stories—stories that maybe you wished you had written—they are able to identify all the details that those great stories have in common. That’s where I come in: I write stories for a l

Explore this link on the map →

related reading