It's no longer unusual to have Artificial Intelligence technology respond for you: remember that time when you received an email from your boss and even before you could key in a reply, a series of predictive texts popped up on screen? There's "noted," "sure," "i'll be there," and the most common, "thank you for your mail." "Smart computer," we think. Well, not too far behind is the day when full-length novels written by computers will also be the norm, say AI experts. Only two weeks ago, researchers at Facebook developed an AI that wrote a story on alien abduction. Closer home, a 300-page English book written by Calicut-based author Srinivas Mahankali, comprising one lakh words, was translated into Mandarin in flat 30 seconds by an AI bot, and that, too, "with 95 per cent accuracy". The recent developments aside, we reached out to tech experts to offer us a crash course on AI-generated literature and most importantly, equip our own machines to write one.

How it works
Back in 2016, software professionals Myles O'Neill and Anthony Voutas along with their friends from San Francisco, launched Literai.com — a site that hosts tutorials to make artificial fiction accessible to all. "The idea was to get the home computer create a software that generates an AI, which can write stories," says O'Neill in a telephonic chat. Here, the AI is fed with a specific data set — usually material worth 100 books — and it uses this data to string sentences together. "The whole system is based on seeing and picking up patterns that sometimes even human beings don't notice. So, the AI could take very specific text from the data it is fed with, or certain characters from these books and put it all together to create stories, often with good grammar and accurate spellings," adds O'Neill. But, because it's a machine that's at work, what you get for a story is a "big mix of randomness," says Voutas. "It also depends on the kind of books you put into this data set." For instance, when you combine cookbooks with JK Rowling's novels in a data set, it could throw amusing results, he adds.