In my most recent creative technology explorations, I’ve been really interested in autonomous software that can generate music or art. In reading about this stuff on the Web, I often find comments along the lines of “the computers will put the composers out of work.” In a fascinating post about neural-network-based machine intelligence writing prose and poetry, Ross Goodwin has the perfect response.
When we teach computers to write, the computers don’t replace us any more than pianos replace pianists—in a certain way, they become our pens, and we become more than writers. We become writers of writers.
Yes, please. I want to do that.
Since the above-linked post was written, Goodwin has written a new post linking to this delightfully insane film, shot from a screenplay written by his neural network algorithms.
(The writers I’m writing are much dumber than the ones Goodwin is writing, but it’s still fascinating and thrilling to me. Here’s an example of one of the better things my little guy made.)