Synthetic Literature: Writing Science Fiction in a Co Creative Process
This paper describes a co creative text generation system applied within a science fiction setting to be used by an established novelist. The project was initiated as part of The Dutch Book Week, and the generated text will be published within a volume of science fiction stories. We explore the ramifications of applying Natural Language Generation within a cocreative process, and examine where the cocreative setting challenges both writer and machine. We employ a character level language model to generate text based on a large corpus of Dutch novels that exposes a number of tunable parameters to the user. The system is used through a custom graphical user interface, that helps the writer to elicit, modify and incorporate suggestions by the text generation system. Besides a literary work, the output of the present project also includes user generated meta data that is expected to contribute to the quantitative evaluation of the text generation system and the co creative process involved.
CC NLG@INLG