I love the convenience of technology. My fascination began in the late ‘80s when, as a child, I saw Rocky IV and Paulie received a robot butler as a gift. I thought that was so cool. Of course the only “robot” I received from my parents was a plastic object that stood two-feet tall and zoomed in only one direction after a button was pressed.
Hardly something that could serve me birthday cake in bed.
And while AI technology can go too far (in my opinion) … i, ROBOT, anyone? Or, in actual real-life news, Facebook having to shut down their bots in July after the bots developed their own language and began communicating with each other, the programmers not understanding the newly developed language…
I’m still fascinated with technology.
While in the 1950s everyone thought we’d be living in the Jetson’s space-age by now, we’re not. Yet it appears that slowly we’re moving in that direction. Saudi Arabia officially has its first robot citizen. I’m not certain if that’s creepy or cool, but regardless, AI technology is this world’s future.
The writing community will not be exempt.
Before Halloween last month, MIT built and AI bot to write scary stories. Her name is Shelly, and she’s on Twitter. She’s great as a story prompt. Tweet to her the start of a horror story with #yourturn and she’ll continue the next installment of the story before turning it back over to you.
According to one of the researchers on the project, Shelly was trained on over 140,000 horror stories and is able to create her own stories based on what she has learned.
She’s pretty simple at this time, I’m sure. I haven’t yet written a story with Shelly. But technology has to start somewhere. How advanced will AI development be in even five years from now?
I graduated high school in the late 90s. This year marks my 20th high school reunion. Ouch. Through my newsfeed on Facebook came an article about the top technology in 1997, my graduation year.
The internet was still new to the general population. Netscape was a ‘thing’. And don’t forget Palm Pilots.
Obviously we’ve come a long ways in the past couple of decades. Shelly is something new that will continue to grow and advance, so check her out @shelly_ai on Twitter. Give her a few more years as technology evolves, and it will be interesting to see what programmers have developed her into.