AI generated ebooks - customized for the reader

[FatDog]

I just finished listening to Jasper Ffords "Well of Lost Plots" where part of the conflict is the Book World switching to the new "Ultra Word" operating system with all kinds of features.

There is lots of buzz about ChatBot and AI assisted tools for writing.

The 2 things seemed to click.

Yes - asking AI to write something from a few sentences is impressive.

But AI works best if you do not take the first result but order it to fine-tune the results.

What if I pasted "Game of Thrones" into an AI and told it to re-write it for a 7 year old. Dragons must be replaced with Unicorns, sex removed and instead of different kingdoms - it is set in a middle grade school and the different 'kingdoms' are after school clubs fighting over size and supremacy. (Sounds like every Japanese Manga comic).

Or re-write "Game of Thrones" but based around a young woman entering military service struggling among the different specialties.

Then my mind went to the idea of "AI Seed Books".

An author creates characters & situations as a template. Then Kindle runs it through an AI like this:

• When a young female relative orders a copy of "Game of Thrones" she gets a customized to her age/reading level, most of the main characters are women.
  
• When the same relative as a teen orders the same book - it is now about a co-ed entering college and the conflicts come from the Greek system - which to join, etc.
  
• When an older guy orders the book - it reads like "Kushels Dart" where the different kingdoms have different sexual specialties. Instead of 6-page descriptions of each meal, the sex scenes take over.

Basically - could an author create interesting characters, several scenarios and let AI 'run the play/book' in different ways to fit the reader?

Lets take Harry Potter:

• My 7 yo would get the original Harry Potter.
  
• As an adult that tells Kindle/AI that I am ok with sexual content - I get a more mature version with sex scenes. But since I have an engineering background - Hogwarts becomes MIT. Potions class becomes Chemistry and Quiditch becomes "Call of Duty" or some other E-sports video game.

Could AI let publishers sell the same rough book to multiple age groups & genders?

Authors worry less about pacing and structure and more about the characters, how they develop, how they interact and rough outlines of their roles. AI fills in dialog, scenes, progression - but tuned to the age, gender and interest level of the reader.

Does this sound exciting or horrible? I am conflicted.

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True story here:

Daughters middle grade class sent home a flyer. English class was switching to a "Whole Word" concept. Students would not be judged on sentence structure, spelling punctuation but more on how well they communicated ideas.

Wife and I were worried about this. Would this affect her later education or college scores?

I was in a used book store and in the Kids section found a woman with a stack of books. She was a English teacher and was buying used, age-appropriate books for her class.

I brought up the change to the English curriculum to her and she recognized it as something that had been used about a dozen years ago. (Our state MUST change approaches to education every few years).

She said she was teaching High School when the middle grade kids educated with 'Whole Word' had come through. She could recognize them - because the writing was much, much better. Since the kids did not worry about grammar, spelling, etc., they wrote more and were much more creative.

Less structure = more creative and verbose writing...

Could AI let authors 'word vomit' or 'character vomit' then take care of the grunt work of putting it into a story?

AI can proof read. AI can say "The reader must have AAA level of education to read this book." Will this allow authors to skip having proof-readers at least at first few rewrites?

Can AI taking the grunt work out of writing so authors are free to be more creative? Or will authors 'dumb down' their characters & stories so AI can churn versions to target 7-70 year olds?

My mind is spinning so thank you for letting me process by writing this all down.

[Quoth]

Probably not.

And AI can't proof read or edit in any meaningful sense.

But I agree that over emphasis on spelling is stupid. Over emphasis on grammar in one sense is even more stupid as it's not even as rigorous as spelling.

Less structure = more creative and verbose writing...

No, spelling and grammar are only a sort of micro-structure and not worrying too much about spelling or grammar only applies to starting to learn to write. Verbosity for it's own sake is bad. Lack of structure or lots has no correlation to creativity.
You do need to learn how actions and tags and voice identifies the characters in dialogue. You do need structure.

Certainly clearly communicating or telling a good story is more important than someone's concept of grammar (and school teachers can be wrong on grammar) or spelling (which has no wiggle room in the USA compared to here).

Exact spelling is only since dictionaries and does have variation, more so in non-USA English than the USA. Webster is to blame for a prescriptive approach.

I deleted some words from the built in dictionary of my spelling checker because while in British English many alternate spellings are perfectly correct a particular work (novel, report etc) has to be consistent.

[j.p.s]

Originally Posted by Quoth

I deleted some words from the built in dictionary of my spelling checker because while in British English many alternate spellings are perfectly correct a particular work (novel, report etc) has to be consistent.

What about in a work which (in part) discusses spelling variations across locales?

[Quoth]

Originally Posted by j.p.s

What about in a work which (in part) discusses spelling variations across locales?

There are always edge cases.

Or even discussing valid spelling variations in British English as used in UK, IoM, Channel Is and Ireland. Same locale, but why or when do you use -ise or -ize, nosy or nosey (both OK in my Browser UK-En dictionary, ae or æ and others. Some common misspellings will become "official" as OED reflects usage rather than being prescriptive.

Not sure which English Malta uses, but one of two countries in EU both with English as an official language and also an indigenous language that's official (Irish and Maltese), though they have maybe more native speakers of multiple lanaguages than Ireland. Maltese is the only Semitic language with official status in the European Union. Irish (and other Celtic languages that survive) is also unique in EU as an official language as it's not related to any European language, though had Latin loan words for gold and silver before the Romans invaded Britain.

Words in English from Irish are used even in Unionist Community in Northern Ireland. Brogue for shoe, shuck for ditch, gansey for pullover/jumper and of course whiskey (whisky in Scotland), the oldest Celtic word in English (actually from two Celtic words for water and life).

But MS Word & LO Writer both allow custom dictionaries (text files) and I think only one line needs edited to transfer a dictionary. Certainly I transferred all my MS Word custom dictionaries to LO Writer in about 2015. Maybe earlier.

EDIT:
You can mark words, paragraphs etc in LO Writer (presumably also in MS Word) to be a particular language and set language for a custom user dictionary. Then spell check works that way. I've added Irish, German and French into English documents that way.

[ZodWallop]

Originally Posted by FatDog

Basically - could an author create interesting characters, several scenarios and let AI 'run the play/book' in different ways to fit the reader?

Could AI let publishers sell the same rough book to multiple age groups & genders?

There are (or were) those personalized kids books where you could have your brat's name inserted into the book. I could see using AI as the great leap forward for those things.

And:

Lets take Harry Potter:

• My 7 yo would get the original Harry Potter.
  
• As an adult that tells Kindle/AI that I am ok with sexual content - I get a more mature version with sex scenes.

Yuck.

[Calenorn]

We could cure cancer or curb global warming.

But, no. It's more important to have robot fan fiction.

We're doomed.

[ZodWallop]

Originally Posted by Calenorn

We could cure cancer or curb global warming.

But, no. It's more important to have robot fan fiction.

We're doomed.

I honestly don't think the development of AI is preventing either of those from being solved.

Reality TV is a more sure sign that we are doomed.

[DiapDealer]

More than three posts in a row sharing an opinion on the most likely harbinger of our doom is a more likely sign that we are doomed.

[arjaybe]

I'll disagree with that just to keep us safe a little longer.

[ownedbycats]

Originally Posted by Calenorn

We could cure cancer or curb global warming.

But, no. It's more important to have robot fan fiction.

We're doomed.

"Humans doing the hard jobs on minimum wage while the robots write poetry and paint is not the future I wanted" (source)

[PlatinumWarlock]

Originally Posted by FatDog

My mind is spinning so thank you for letting me process by writing this all down.

That was a fascinating thought process… thanks for sharing.

[meeera]

Mate if you want Harry Potter sex scenes, humans of the internet are here for you already.

[Sunlite]

For me, adapting the content of books to the reader in that manner sounds destructive.

It would never be possible to discuss a story, because everyone would have read a different one. Probably with a different ending.

Also catering only to the preferences of a person means, they can not grow. If they are never confronted with new ideas or different wayss of life they can only become narrow minded.

Being able to experience different world and cultures or the same culture through a different perspective is the good part of books. Taking that away would be horrible.

I definitly do not want to only read books in one setting or with someone like me as a protagonist.

[Freeshadow]

@FatDog

(Sounds like every Japanese Manga comic).

Yep.

based around a young woman entering military service

"The Deed of Paksenarrion"
@Quoth I wouldn't take grammar too lightly. After all there is a significant difference between going down on Shannon and going down the Shannon. (As who gets wet and if getting wet is a success.

As for the idea of an 'artist ' merely lining out the specs and AI doing all the filling I remember for sure that Asimov had predicted it although I don't remember in which book exactly.
As for personalized content with name insertion, wasn't it predicted in "Fahrenheit 451" (as well as true wireless ear buds btw.) Welcome to the future.

[Quoth]

Originally Posted by Freeshadow

@Quoth I wouldn't take grammar too lightly. After all there is a significant difference between going down on Shannon and going down the Shannon. (As who gets wet and if getting wet is a success.

But Shannon could be a person, not the river. Though properly the spelling for both is Sionna (or similar), who was a "river goddess". Still used as Sionna and Shannon for first names and Shannon is a common surname here.
An "s" is Irish is almost always an sh sound, and once had a dot above to indicate it. But unlike mh, gh, dh, ch etc, the undotted s was so rare the dot got left off. Later the dots replaced by h (typesetting and later typewriters), so the letter i originally had no dot so as to avoid confusion with í.

I don't take grammar lightly, but there are trivially obviously wrong cases that current grammar checkers miss and correct usage they flag as wrong. The context and kind of writing (fiction, report, project proposal) is important. Compared to spelling checking as you type (which can be wrong or miss typos), grammar checking is best off while typing and then review later with spell check and pinch of salt. Then proof read a copy on eink and mark up with big highlights for context.