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Are there any meaningful books entirely written by an artificial intelligence? I mean something with meaning, unlike random words or empty books. Something that can be charactersed as fiction literature.

If yes, then I think it is also interesting to know if any of those books is available for sale. Is there a specific name for such books? Like "robot books"?

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    $\begingroup$ As of now, I don't think that any meaningful book has been written by an artificial intelligence. Maybe the closest thing to what you are looking for are texts generated by models like GPT-3, but I could also be wrong, given that I am not really an expert in this area. For example, have a look at this blog post. $\endgroup$
    – nbro
    Nov 1, 2020 at 1:02
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    $\begingroup$ AFAIK, no there is none. But you should define what is a "meaningful book". In France, see writings by Oulipo - in 1960 or 1970 (also this...) $\endgroup$
    – Basile Starynkevitch
    Nov 1, 2020 at 7:49
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    $\begingroup$ There are none. $\endgroup$
    – Oliver Mason
    Nov 1, 2020 at 18:13
  • $\begingroup$ How about short novels like 10 or 20 pages? $\endgroup$
    – Joe Jobs
    Nov 1, 2020 at 18:28
  • $\begingroup$ I found this website - booksby.ai - it claims to contain only books written by AI - like for example this one book - Dinner Depression — Julia Joy Raffel – $\endgroup$
    – Joe Jobs
    Nov 2, 2020 at 3:39

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James Ryan has done a lot of 'archaeological' work on this; you can find references to his work on his website.

Story generation has been a dream for a long time (in computing terms), and various genres have been explored, with not that much success. There have been episodes of a Western written by a computer (and actually filmed and acted out by human actors, see summary here), and various books, but the technology is nowhere near good enough to produce something worthwhile reading or watching without heavy editing.

So far it's only good for curiosity value.

There is NaNoGenMo, where since 2013 people work on programs generating novels. But most of them — again — are more interesting for curiosity. They either take an existing work and modify it procedurally, or generate random templated text (eg travel reports through a ficticious, auto-generated landscape). I don't think anyone has met the target of creating a 50k novel by computer yet.

Modern approaches with deep learning generators can produce reams of more or less well-formed text, but that doesn't make a compelling story. It's the meaning that is currently the problem, and as AI researchers keep finding out, it's hard.

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