SEER and Novel Writing

I created an artificial intelligence called SEER (Sentient Electronically Engineered Recounter) to help me co-author my novel Love Song of Zero and One, but I'm not the first to use AI or randomness to help me write.

Last year Zachary Mason's excellent novel The Lost Books of the Odyssey came out on Farrar, Straus & Giroux after moving sideways for awhile on Starcherone Press. For that book, he used AI to generate ideas for alternate endings to Homer's epic, but did not include its text in the book, or credit it with co-authorship. Before him, David Ferrucci and collaborators created BRUTUS, an AI for writing novels. And before them, Philip K. Dick threw the I-Ching to ignite his sense of possibility while writing novels. Before him, William S. Burroughs cut up pages and tossed them in the air, reassmbling the fallen words into new sentences. The list goes on.


For my AI, I used Java and researched Markov n-gram models, Bayesian belief networks, and machine learning algorithms. I talked for guidance to people I know who grasp AI a little better. I will post more about the process soon.