Making Authors and Writers Obsolete?

By Jack November 12, 1999 3:18 PM

Last week, InstantNovelist.com posted five short stories on their Web site, a forum for writers.?Four of the 500-word tales were written by humans, but the fifth is by Brutus.1, a fiction-writing program developed by Selmer Bringsjord, director of the Minds and Machines Laboratory at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, N.Y.?Visitors to the site can vote on which story they think was created by a computer.?InstantNovelist.com picked the four human-penned pieces after reviewing online entries from 390 contributors, who had a month to labor over their prose.?The Brutus.1 spit out its story in seconds.?The votes have been pouring in, and with close to 2000 votes we begin to wonder if computer artificial intelligence(AI) is going to make Authors Obsolete, I suddenly feel a slight level of hatred and jealousy building up toward my computer as I write this article.