Angus Fletcher writes:

You’ve been hoaxed.

The hoax seems harmless enough. A few thousand AI researchers have claimed that computers can read and write literature. They’ve alleged that algorithms can unearth the secret formulas of fiction and film. That Bayesian software can map the plots of memoirs and comic books. That digital brains can pen primitive lyrics and short stories—wooden and weird, to be sure, yet evidence that computers are capable of more.

But the hoax is not harmless. If it were possible to build a digital novelist or poetry analyst, then computers would be far more powerful than they are now. They would in fact be the most powerful beings in the history of Earth. Their power would be the power of literature, which although it seems now, in today’s glittering silicon age, to be a rather unimpressive old thing, springs from the same neural root that enables human brains to create, to imagine, to dream up tomorrows. It was the literary fictions of H.G. Wells that sparked Robert Goddard to devise the liquid-fueled rocket, launching the space epoch; and it was poets and playwrights—Homer in The Iliad, Karel Čapek in Rossumovi Univerzální Roboti—who first hatched the notion of a self-propelled metal robot, ushering in the wonder-horror of our modern world of automata.

If computers could do literature, they could invent like Wells and Homer, taking over from sci-fi authors to engineer the next utopia-dystopia. And right now, you probably suspect that computers are on the verge of doing just so: Not too far in the future, maybe in my lifetime even, we’ll have a computer that creates, that imagines, that dreams. You think that because you’ve been duped by the hoax. The hoax, after all, is everywhere: college classrooms, public libraries, quiz games, IBM, Stanford, Oxford, Hollywood. It’s become such a pop-culture truism that Wired enlisted an algorithm, SciFiQ, to craft “the perfect piece of science fiction.”

Yet despite all this gaudy credentialing, the hoax is a complete cheat, a total scam, a fiction of the grossest kind. Computers can’t grasp the most lucid haiku. Nor can they pen the clumsiest fairytale. Computers cannot read or write literature at all. And they never, never will. [Continue reading…]