AI-generated first lines

onesecondglance

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An AI researcher trained a neural network to generate first lines for novels, with some awesome results.

A neural network learns by example, looking at a database of things (paint color names, craft beer names, halloween costumes) and trying to figure out how to imitate it.

So the researcher, Janelle Shane, got her readers to submit examples of first lines, both from published novels and short stories and their own work, and let the neural net go to work...

[The neural net] learned eventually how to begin a book by talking about the weather - although not always successfully.

There was the snow of a perfect custom sea and early gusts from the back of the bay.

The sky was dead.

The night was very a moonless story in a mountain-10 years.

The night is like a wounded carpets from the Crumzon.

The first day of the world was born in the year 1985, in an old side of the world, and the air of the old sky of lemon and waves and berries.

:Wha: ... it got better with some more practice.

My favourite examples would make great writing prompts:

It is a man trick.
[...]
The sky has gone.
[...]
I was surfing for my table.
[...]
The silence was unlike a place.

"I am forced to write to my neighbors about the beast."

Her mother was packing by the black anthill.

The sun was probably for his wife.

I am a story that was not a truth.

"I am not the door!"

I don’t know what is a combined life.

This is the story of a certain man who had invented a young man.

The sky was at the door.

Alice is a story of interest.

The question was enjoying himself.

This is a story of a man in the morning.

The world was born to say that I was lost.

I saw the last of a man, who was dead.

The old man was the first of us of the beginning to the sky.

(loads more great AI / neural net oddities at http://aiweirdness.com.)
 

Frankie007

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kind of the upgraded version of letting monkeys write the perfect novel?
 

Tazlima

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I rather like this one:
"I am forced to write to my neighbors about the beast."
 

Loke1997

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This is a story of a man in the morning.

Every single one makes you want to read more. Even this one. Because it is so mundane, it gives me the impression that whatever comes next will be absolutely extraordinary.